


A Well Made Trap

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harem, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-04
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 11:05:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1742501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malik has spent the whole of his reign as king in an effort to root out the traitors that betrayed and murdered his father.  Years after his father's death, long after his reign has become known as a reign of executions and relentless warfare, the traitors find an ally in the 'White Ghost' the only man known to be more merciless than Malik himself.  Malik sets a trap for the man with the help of a single foreigner branded as a spy and a mute 'eunuch' that serves the King's sister in the harem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is probably not the harem AU you'd expect. originally suggested by 'thekingofnovices' over on tumblr.

Malik laid a trap and it went like this:

\--

Maria Thorpe came from the North, far and beyond the borders of his kingdom. She came back to Malik as a prisoner, covered in filth and burns from the ropes they had used to tie her arms to her body. When she was thrown onto the floor in front of him, her eyes were bright-as-firelight, and she spit curses at him that would have been enough to condemn any other man to death. His guards had stood with impartial glances while the advisors that clotted the spaces all around him looked horrified.

“Have you heard of me?” Malik said because nobody knew-he-knew this woman. He stood over her, watched the white blanching of her skin turn pink at the edges as her blood flooded to the surface in rage-not-embarrassment. Her clothes were torn here-and-there and there was blood at the edge of her mouth turned brown and crusted over the bruises that colored her right cheek. Black blood pooled below her eye and made it swell halfway shut but she still gnashed her teeth at him. “You have.” 

“I have seen the bodies of the many dead left piled outside of your walls,” she hissed at him, “you are not a king but a monster in human form. We will end the plague you spread across the land.” Then she jumped at him and Malik punched her before she could sink her teeth into his body. The guards dragged her back, left her blood in a long streak across the floor and hauled her up to hold her unconscious body up for his inspection. 

“Tell them to wash her. I want the people to see her clearly when she’s executed.” Then he waved his hand and sent the guards away. 

\--

Altair afforded the respect of no one, not the women that populated the harem, not the guards that stood beyond its doors, not the other eunuchs that doted on the King’s mother. He was a giant kept in the company of short women and little boys, forever condemned to ducking his head and bowing his back to keep from offended the delicate sensibilities of the King’s mother.

“She hates you,” Karida (the King’s delicate-flower of a sister) said to him. They had taken up sitting out in the sun during the coolest part of the day: she listened to the motion of the kingdom beyond the harem walls and he offered her sweet things to eat and made sure to keep her cool and comfortable. “But you were brought to us so late. She thinks it isn’t right—you were already a man before you were cut. She thinks there’s violence in men when they get too old that cannot be taken out by any means. If you had still been a child, she might not hate you so.” Karida looked up at him when she said it, that quirk at the edge of her lips the same-as-her-brother with the unflinching brashness of the very same brown eyes. For only a matter of seconds her eyes drifted down to assess his crotch and the supposed absence of things to be found there. 

Altair said nothing because he was never invited to say anything. His purpose was only to serve the sweet-faced sister of the King. There was no loyalty in the venom he wanted to pour into her ears. So he kept his silence while she looked over at the wall with a wistful glance. “They sound busy today.” (Don’t worry, he may have said, one day your brother will sell you to make an alliance. You’ll be free of this place and off to see the world.)

When the summons came, Altair went barefoot and shirtless through the castle up-and-up to where the King’s room looked out upon his kingdom. The guard that escorted him gave him a foul sneer like saying, (useless eunuch, filthy infidel). The King would not have trusted the guard to escort him if he could be easily swayed into spilling the secrets he thought he kept. This loyalty on the part of the other man did nothing to stop Altair from thinking about his blood seeping across the floor as he pushed open the door and stepped into the king’s room.

Malik was at the window, dressed in fine clothes with his arms behind his back and his face set in a grim frown. “They’re getting closer,” Malik said when the door was shut.

“But not close enough if I am still an unwanted prisoner in your harem,” Altair said in return. He threw himself onto Malik’s monstrous bed, luxuriated in the fine feeling of it and the familiar warmth that sank through his skin. For a moment he closed his eyes and pretended nothing-had-ever changed but when he opened his eyes again, Malik was looking down at him from the full height of his royal status and Altair was dressed as a harem servant lying across his bed like a sacrificial offering. 

“You should not wish for war,” Malik said. “War is what killed your family. War is what brought us to the point of desperation. War is what gave birth to things like you and I.” There was no regret in his words, just hollow recitation of fact because the things-they-were didn’t feel regret-and-pain the way other men did. No, Malik had been born in a time of bloodshed, reared on the horrific stories of his father’s ruthless reign of murder. When he took the throne, it was soaked in the blood of innocents-and-enemies alike. His own reign started with a massacre and there was nobody-now-that had ever forgotten the child King with blood on his hands ordering the deaths of a dozen traitors. Peace had not been bought with kindness but with relentless effort. 

“I do not wish for war,” Altair said. “I wish for my debt repaid and my freedom restored. If war is what allows that then I welcome it.” He rolled onto his belly and crawled forward on his hands and knees until his face was brushing against the King’s fine clothes and Malik’s warm hands were pushing down his back. Malik’s fingernails dug into his skin as he pulled his hands back up the length of Altair’s spine to cup the back of his head and lift his face up. Altair clawed his hands into Malik’s clothes as he straightened and kissed Malik.

“Your mother still believes I’m a eunuch,” Altair mumbled into Malik’s mouth. His hands were busy-busy stripping all the layers of clothing in his way. Under it, Malik was tight and thin. His body hardened by necessity into a ruthless and effective killing machine. “She thinks I’m dangerous, she thinks you waited too long to have me _cut_ , that I’m _violent_ and _lustful_ even without a _weapon_. What would she think if she knew the truth?” His hand was big around Malik’s wrist, dragging it down between his legs where his erection grew harder with every bitten off sound the _King_ made. 

“It is amazing that your arrogance only grows in circumstances meant to smother it.” Malik tipped his head back to show his neck and Altair nipped and kissed at his skin, let his hands slide down the length of his body and up again. “I can’t help but think if I had them truly make you a eunuch your ego might have grown too large to contain.”

“If you had made me a eunuch, who would keep your bed warm in the evening?” Altair asked. 

“Don’t overestimate your own importance,” the King said. But his body was arching against Altair’s now that it was stripped of clothes. Malik fell into the bed easily, fit under him with practiced ease the way his body opened up to welcome Altair when he fucked into him. 

\--

“There’s a woman,” Malik said. “Tomorrow I plan to hang her. You will kill Jalal, wound one other man and rescue her. If anyone else dies or if the woman does not survive you have failed and your debt will increase. Bring her to the harem and hide her among the other women.”

Altair had groaned at him, face caught in a grimace at the restrictions he was given. The man had never failed to assassinate his target but he had long been an unfocused force set free upon the world. Malik found him when they were both young and taught him the necessity of control and concentration. “What has Jalal done to offend you?”

“He rapes women,” Malik said. “I have no use for a man like him. Do not fail, Altair.”

\--

Morning found him hidden in a corner of the harem where he kept his assassin’s robes. They fit his body far better than the sparse costume of a harem servant. The purpose they gave him was far more useful than attending the king’s spoiled little sister and dealing with the petty vengeance of his brittle mother. The other women that kept time in this prison had been collected by the previous king—all of them beautiful and willing, well fed and well cared for by the servants that attended them and the promise of pleasing the king. But they were irrelevant to him—so deeply unimportant to the King and the kingdom as a whole that he barely took notice of them.

Altair pulled his hood up to cover his head, straightened it so the peak obscured most of his face and sheathed his sword at his side. There was a passage that took him down underneath the earth and opened out onto the side of the mountain. Malik had shown him how to climb the side of it, how to creep back into the open spread of the market without being caught. He ducked his head and found a cluster of scholars that were spurred into action by the swift nudge of his elbow. 

“Take me to the execution,” he said softly. 

And they began to walk.

\--

Executions were a public spectacle, at first by his order and then by habit alone. The start of his reign had been marked by the discovery of a hidden nest of traitors that had conspired to murder his father. The fact that his father died of his own stupidity was not a reason to forgive their actions. Malik had spent years rooting them out from loyal men and hanging them. He had built a network of men—the very scavengers of society—to search through his kingdom and seek out the disloyal dissenters that planned to overthrow him. They were wretched examples of humanity: cripples and beggar women, filthy children and diseased men. Wherever they went they were scorned and hated whenever they were not completely invisible. Their ears were the ones that heard the true song of his kingdom.

In public, Malik despised them. As he despised many things—women like Maria, for instance. He stood above the crowd assembled to witness Maria’s execution and smiled at the trash they had brought to throw at her. A loyal man had dressed her in a brown scrap that barely made a dress. Her hair had been cut off close to her scalp and her arms were bound to her chest the same as they had been the day before. He had not ordered her gagged because there were no words she could shout into the crowd that would have been audible over the roar of their hatred for her. 

A slow crawl of scholars entered the square from the far side, shuffling on bare feet with bowed heads. They were hardly better than the beggar boys that Malik sent to find men that needed to die, save that they were academic in their invisibility. Altair liked them while Malik barely tolerated them. Right then he must have been in the center of them, slipping by a horde of guards who could not be taught to recognize the difference between an assassin and a scholar no matter how many weapons Altair carried with him. 

“For crimes against the kingdom,” the executioner was shouting over the tearing shriek of the crowd. Jalal was behind him coiling the noose around Maria’s neck. Even at this distance Malik could see the way Maria pulled her lips back from her teeth to hiss at him and the confidence that moved Jalal’s body against her. Even in these final moments of her life, he looked at her as nothing but an object with which to sate himself. 

The scholars stopped at the edge of the gallows and shifted their formation to allow Altair the room he required to sprint through them. There was never anything noticeably strategic about Altair’s attacks—he preferred a matter of spectacle and the thrill of outrunning his pursuers to caution. But he was an absolute masterpiece in motion, a white blur that leapt from the center of the scholars to the top of the gallows. He took the executioner down with one quick jab of a short blade in his upper thigh before he was darting across to Jalal. 

Jalal fell with a blade in his throat and his meaty hands grasping at the fount of blood spraying out around the weapon. Maria jerked away from Altair—she knew nothing of him, nothing of his mission at all—but he wrapped an arm around her body and used his short sword to slice through the rope over her head before he threw them both off the back of the gallows. The guards were a massive force as they stormed after them, each of them shouting something until the sum of their voices rose above the shocked silence of the crowd. 

“Find the assassin!” Malik shouted, “bring me his head!”

\--

The thing that the King had not been as gracious as to share with him was the fact that the woman he was being sent to collect was a bitch. Altair hit the ground with her cradled against his body to protect her from the brunt of the impact and she thanked him by kneeing him in the gut before fighting her way back to her feet. “Our cause must be in a desperate state if you are the best they could manage.” Then before he was even on his feet again she was darting away so that he had to catch her first and evade the guards second. 

“If you’d allow me to lead this rescue, I have an actual plan,” he snapped back at her. It was easy to drag her off the path she’d chosen for herself by pulling on the rope around her chest but she overcompensated and sent the two of them falling into a street vendor. The merchant screamed in outrage and the guards were on them in a matter of seconds.

“Are you inept in some way?” the woman shouted as he pushed her forward and ducked out of the way of swords. His hands itched to draw a weapon and the constricting tightness of the hidden blade on his left arm pulsed with a need to bury the blade in resistant flesh. “Do you have moral objections to killing?” She barely had breath to run but she managed to find bursts of air to insult him as they made a shaky dash through the market and around the corner to where a ladder rested against the side of a building. “I have no arms,” she hissed at him.

Altair grabbed her by the ropes and spun her around so she was pressed face-first against the ladder hard enough it shook in place. He pulled his short sword and cut through the rope at the bottom so he could pull it. It unwound around her body as she turned a tight circle and was left dizzying and gripping the ladder with a half-realized curse in her mouth. “Get up there,” he snapped.

She kicked him in the face when he moved to follow her and had the gall to look very pleased with herself when he made it to the top. His jaw smarted from the impact but it was a minor concern in comparison to the force of guards that were searching for him. He pulled the woman toward a rooftop garden so they fell inside. Once they were hidden behind the curtains, the woman had the common sense to bite her tongue while the guards ran past.

They crouched there in the muggy interior of the garden until the commotion faded away. The network of beggars and common thieves were doubtlessly leading the guards out and away with shouts of surprise and claims of having seen the white assassin run past. Altair spent a moment to be thankful for Malik’s efficiency. 

“Who are you?” the woman asked him. Her white face had gone all ruddy from the heat in the cramped little square. Without the ropes, the threadbare dress did a poor job of hiding the curves of her body. He spent a moment looking down the gaping neck of her dress at where her skin was mottled with bruises over old scrapes. 

“I am the man who saved your life, who are you?” he asked.

“Seeing how you just saved me, I would have thought you knew who I was. Or do you just make a habit of saving whoever is sent to the gallows. That must be a busy schedule for you.” But she went on before he could even answer her accusation and said, “oh never mind. Judging from your speed and proficiency with a sword you are nothing but a weapon. The king has always been very good at gathering the tools he needs, having a sharp sword is very useful indeed.” There was something almost impressed in her tone beneath the seething contempt. “I am Maria. Where do you plan on taking us?”

“First off the side of a cliff,” he said. He very serious considered pushing her from the edge and letting gravity handle the rest. “Then into the harem.” 

Maria’s face was a beautiful mix of horror and surprise. He smiled at her before he jumped out of the garden and took off across the rooftops. He picked up speed when he heard her footsteps at his back.

\--

Malik did not enter the harem frequently—partially because he had no use for the many women that had been brought to live there. Partially because his Mother would attack him the instant he entered and demand to know why he did not visit with greater frequency, if he could be bothered to take a lover or three from the many women brought here for that very purpose. She would throw names at him and summon women that fell into him with slithery willingness. 

In another lifetime, he thought he might tell his mother that he had no desire to make children with women chosen primarily for their looks and secondarily for their intelligence. He did not need a son born with an attractive face and an empty head. 

This night, when he entered the harem, his stride was long and his body tight with the fury of too many hours of uncertainty. The advisors took it as anger that the assassin had struck again (under their very noses) and evaded his guards. It was just as well that they did because the men were still out in the city, sneaking around buildings and interrogating whoever they could find on the street. His mother had already retired when he entered the harem and by her decree all of the other women were safely bedded down in their apartments. 

“It’s good you came,” Altair said when he stepped forward out of the shadow. He was bare to the waist now, his skin shining with perspiration at the fading heat of the day. “This woman would not have lasted so long if you’d waited another hour.” 

“Take me to her,” Malik said. Altair sneered at the command but he did as he was asked. Here, in these clothes, he still moved as the predator he was in his long assassin’s robes. They worked their way through the harem, down into the lower level where the least favored were kept and through the dusty halls to the darkest parts. Altair pushed open the door to the room he kept and motioned Malik inside.

Maria was standing inside, wearing a spare set of clothes that Altair must have stolen for her. The clothes fit to her body in a decidedly feminine way—entirely unlike the ones she usually wore. “At last!” she said loudly, “a man with intelligence. Explain to me why you sent this to rescue me. Surely, it would have been just as effective to send a wild animal.”

Altair did not growl or hiss but his body tightened up with the same action of bristling as the wild animal Maria accused him of being. “You could be thankful that anyone bothered to save you at all.”

Maria threw her arms up at Altair and he bared his teeth at her in return.

Malik only sighed. “I see now that my decision to keep the two of you separated was one of my wisest.” When he touched Maria’s face she did not flinch but tip her head to the side so he could see the broken part of her skin where he had hit her only the day before. It had been a calculated strike, meant to inflict bloody but limited damage. “It is a poor repayment for your loyalty,” he said softly. Then he stepped back and found a chair to sit that afforded him the best view of both of them. “The mistake you make is thinking that you are individually more important to me than the other. I may have kept you separated up until now but the time has come for you to work together.”

“I cannot work with a brainless man,” Maria snapped.

Altair said nothing. Anger often moved him to silence that festered into a thickened rage that ended in slaughter. Malik had used this to his advantage often enough. 

“That is enough. Our trusted allies are so very limited in number that they fit into a single room. That each of you were chosen for the portion of the mission that was best suited for you does not make one of you better than the other. Tell me everything you have learned, Maria.”

\--

The truth was that Altair owed a debt he could not repay. His life was spent in the attempt nonetheless. The price he agreed upon years ago had not once changed though the progress he made toward achieving it had often fluctuated. Malik was an excellent mathematician who kept his account secured away in some corner of his head that was not actively seeking to break the conspiracy that nearly cost his family control of the kingdom. 

It was hard to imagine the boy Altair must have been when he was dragged in front of the King with the blood on his hands still wet against his skin. Oh-how-terribly young he had been in those days and filled with nothing but spite. It was the debt that changed him, the offer Malik had made him as he knelt on the cold stone of the palace floor. First Altair had lived in the barracks with the men that taught him to fight, and then with the thieves that taught him to run. His education had been completed with the beggar women on the street that taught him to be invisible in plain sight. 

But it was Malik who taught him how to kill efficiently. It was Malik’s body against his when the heated blood of their kill covered Altair’s hand and Malik’s voice in his ear that said, “I cannot afford to handle these affairs myself any longer. This is how you will serve me.”

Many things had changed in the years since that moment, but none of them so catastrophically as the moment when Maria fell against the cushions where Altair slept and told of _everything_ she had learned. 

She spoke of the conspirators that took refuge in the kingdom to the north, of how they cowered at the feet of Robert De Sable—the so-called White Ghost—that ruled his own land with an unforgiving fist. He had bought peace with warfare, replaced freedom with obedience and had set out to conquer the whole of the world. Maria had walked in his kingdom, she had joined his ranks and listened to the talk of the men that served Robert. They were overcome with exaltation at his excellence, blunted into blind obedience of his every command. Their devotion was inhuman, Maria said. The last of the conspirators that had escaped Malik’s wrath all these years had found a home in Robert’s court. They bought a place with the secrets they whispered into his ear.

“They know where you have hidden your treasure, Malik. And they are coming for it,” Maria said, “one man will not defeat them. When they come, it will be on footsteps too soft to hear until they are too great in number to defeat.”

“That is why there are two,” Malik said. But worry had settled on him and it made him look far older than he was. 

“What treasure?” Altair asked. 

Maria regarded him as an idiot too dense to be trusted with secrets but Malik seemed honestly confused about the question. “Ah,” he said, “I did not tell you. This war was not fought over ideology, Altair. It was not even fought over a place on the throne. Our people have died and our kingdom has suffered for the cause of _greed_. When Rashid betrayed my father, he did it only to recover the treasure that was taken from him. The one that you stole from him, in fact.”

“That metal ball?” Altair said. “It was a heavy piece of gold but there are treasures worth a great deal more.”

Maria actually laughed at him. She clutched at her bruised ribs and laughed at him as if he were a fool far too precious to be real. “This is the man you chose to be your savior!”

“This is the man that saved you!” Altair yelled back.

“You are a dog,” Maria snapped back.

Malik stomped his foot. Altair looked at him and Maria looked shamefaced as she straightened her posture and pulled away from glaring at him. Malik looked tired now, “it was not only gold, Altair. Rashid believed it had the power of illusions. He was sure if he could only possess it that he would have the power of God himself. As soon as he had it within his grasp, it drove him to the brink of madness.”

“Where is it?” Altair asked.

“Here,” Malik said and spread his arms, “in my harem where all the most precious secrets of my kingdom are kept. This is enough for tonight. I must think.”

\--

It was not safe to bring Maria out of the room, so Altair had to slip through the empty halls of the harem and pick at the stores of food. A bit of bread, a plate of fruit—things that could be easily taken and not missed. He carried it back on hurried feet and left it by her sleeping head before he left again to fill a pot with water and fetch towels for her to bathe herself. When he returned to the room (just before dawn) she was still sleeping with the deep intensity of someone who had not felt safe in a very long time. 

Altair regarded her with an impartial eye—tried to weigh her merit based on what little he knew of her. Something ugly and black was moving in his chest (coiling up like a living thing) whenever he looked at her. She was nothing more than another beggar woman that Malik had picked off the street—filthy from ill use—and yet she was held high enough in his regard that she had been sent out to another kingdom to gather information. Malik trusted nobody that existed outside of where he could see them with his own eyes. (Nobody but Altair who had been sent far and away to bring the justice that Malik could not condone publically.) 

Maria was an insult to everything Altair had known about the King only that morning. It festered in the open sunlight filling the yard of the harem. The women were talking-and-talking about the assassin-who-got-away. Their voices were oh-so-hushed tones as they imagined what sort of man he must have been, how strong his body had to have been, how just his cause must have been, how young or old he was. 

Karida sat just beyond their bowed heads and the runny prattle that fell from their mouths. She tipped her head against the stone of the wall and listened to the motion of the kingdom she might never see the extent of. Her smile—always present, even at the worst of times—was faltering on her face as she blinked up into the light at him.

It was said, of the King, that he had been blessed with an intelligence far greater than the average man’s. In his early youth, he had lacked only for limit of things he could master. His mother loved to boast (even to this day) that her womb had produced one of the greatest minds of their generation. _It was not his father’s doing,_ she often told the other women.

“What a terrible mess,” Karida said. She stood up and the fine length of her clothes shifted and fluttered together. She stood barely as tall as his shoulders, was no bigger around than a sapling but there was a defiance in her face that gave the impression of some greater power to her body. With a minute motion she beckoned him to follow her and he moved with placid obedience. “I heard the commotion yesterday—the screaming of so many people at the execution. I couldn’t hear the things they said because there were too many of them but it was as if I could feel the anger in their voices through the air itself. It was only after it was over that I heard they meant to execute a spy and that the assassin rescued her.”

Altair was not allowed to speak to the King’s sister. She knew it, certainly, but it didn’t seem to matter to her. She was slipping back through the archways into the interior of the harem where the women retreated when there was rain or lessons to attend to. 

“It’s a curious thing, this assassin that our kingdom has acquired. Mother tells me that there was no assassin when she was a child—that there wasn’t one when my father reigned. She assured us that this plague came by the hands of the traitors.” She was turning into a hall that led into the apartments where the women slept. Altair-was-not-often welcome even that close to their rooms so he drew to a stop and she frowned at his hesitancy and motioned him forward. “The girl that cleans my room is ill. You’ll have to take over while she is away.” 

There was a thousand things he’d rather have done than clean Karida’s room. But this menial labor was exactly the punishment Malik had laid on his shoulders before he shut him into the harem. So Altair ducked his head and followed after her.

“That is what they think,” Karida said when they were well beyond the range of her mother’s keen hearing. At the doorway to her room she turned into his body abruptly and her slim-little-hand was squeezing at his penis through the front of his pants. Her mouth dropped open in something like horror-and-victory that was not given room to reach full realization. His hand fit across her mouth and nose as his arm slid around her back and he lifted her up and pushed her through the doorway and into her room. 

Inside it was dim, and her teeth bit into his hand in a distracting-sort-of-way. She wriggled and kicked before he slapped her against the wall by the door and leaned the full weight of his body in against hers. The difference in their heights had her head tipped all the way back to see his face as he loomed over her. 

“It’s you,” she whispered underneath his hand. “I knew it. I knew it was you.”

“That is a secret you would have done well to have left undiscovered.” It was the very first words that he had ever spoken to her. 

Karida’s eyes went wide-and-her face went spotted with white-fear. But her body straightened and her limbs did not shake. Her breath faltered only a second before it came back deep and strong as she stood against him with that same unalterable defiance. “You serve the King, my brother, and I doubt he has given you orders to kill _me_. The only danger I face is that my mother will discover us here.”

“You don’t know your brother as well as you think you do,” Altair snapped.

“Don’t I? You are his assassin that kills the men he cannot afford to kill as the king. You live here because the very idea of a trained assassin that is capable of leaping from the top of towers living in a _harem_ is so laughable not even the most insane of men would believe it. And that woman you saved yesterday serves my brother as well—she is his spy. Is she here as well? I do not know his purpose in employing you but what I know about my brother makes believe that his cause is just. And if his cause is just than you must be as well.”

“You assume too much.” 

“Step away from me or I will scream. My brother’s reach is long but it ends at the harem doors. My mother would see you killed the instant she found out the truth.”

“Scream then, let them come. I haven’t had a decent fight in months.” He forgot, for the barest slip of a moment, that Karida-was-not her brother. That for all of her honest bravery, she did not have the merciless nature of her brother. She folded at the words, at the promise of death in his voice, and shrank back against the wall like a scolded child. “Tell nobody what you have discovered. I will speak to your brother about this.” Then he swept out of her room and retreated to the close safety of the common areas to wait until she showed her face or he was called to attend another.

\--

Maria came at dusk, slipping in through a window that had long infuriated Altair in its thinness. While he had raged at the restricting size, Maria slipped through it with great ease and fell on his floor with a gasp of pain. Altair must have given her the means to bathe because the old blood was washed away from her short hair and bruised face.

“I would have returned to you,” Malik said, “it is not safe for you to be climbing around the castle when you have been branded a spy and sentenced to death.” He was not even often in his room so early in the evening. 

“Your dog is foaming at the mouth,” Maria said. She picked herself up off the floor with some difficulty, kept one of her arms close against her ribs and tipped her head back to let out a long-low sound of pain. “You told me once that you found the boy that took the Apple from Rashid.”

“I did.”

“You told me that you had him killed.” The anger in her voice wasn’t at necessarily at discovering the lie, but perhaps that the lie had been so well-given that it had become believable. Maria prided herself on the detection of liars. 

Malik waved his hand in the air. “These were the things you needed to whisper into the ears of men who needed to believe them. By all accounts, that boy did die. Altair is not the child that stole the Apple, he has not been for some time.” He watched her as she straightened up and looked around his room. Her quick eyes settled on the things that had changed and the ones that had remained the same in all this time. Then she looked at him, catalogued him for all the minute differences she had not been available to witness. “I need you to make friends with Altair.”

“I’d rather go back to the gallows,” Maria sneered. She reached out and touched his face, ran her thumb across the rough scratch of hair on his cheeks from the long length of the day. Her skin was not as soft as he remembered but roughened by the long years out beyond his grasp. She was not so young now, not possessed of a round child’s face but transformed into something more mature and feminine. “What sort of friends should I make of him?” she asked. Her hand touched his throat and then down to his chest. “What do you command me to do?”

“Be civil,” Malik said.

“Ah,” she said, “you ask too much.” There was a faint smile on her face that slid away. Her eyes narrowed and she looked away from the delicate stitching on his clothing to his face. “Tell me that you believe this man will be our salvation and I will show him the same allegiance I have shown you.”

“Altair is faster and stronger than any man I have ever seen. He is _relentless_. There is no force in this world but death itself that can stop him. This I know—he will bring an end to this war.” Malik wanted to touch her but the rough edges of her many wounds were still pink-and-raw. The mark he had left on her cheek was ragged and hurtful so he kept his hands at his sides even as she pulled her own away from him. “He cannot do it alone. You know this enemy better, you have to train him how to defeat it.” 

“You expect me to train this man to defeat the White Ghost in a single room inside of your harem?” Maria said, “without being detected?”

“He knows the exits, Maria.” 

Her nod was a dismissal, she turned away from him. The length of her body slid out of reaching distance and he regretted every word he had said almost instantly. The cool frown that cut across her face was nearly the same as a physical attack. “I have to go.” Then she was slipping back out through the window with a grunt of effort.

\--

Maria returned after the sky had gotten dark enough to hide her descent and her light footsteps. Altair waited for her because he had been tasked with keeping her alive but the patience it expended left him feeling rubbed to the point of bleeding. His hands were clenched in a grip he could not force himself to relax. 

(He thought of Karida, long after he’d left her, creeping back into the common rooms with a show of arrogance to cover the mortal fear she felt.)

When Maria let herself back into the room he grabbed her by the arms and shoved her against the wall with muted force. He wanted to break her against the stones; he wanted to cut her open from top to bottom and sate his anger on her fresh blood. All this violence and the most he could do was hold her in place and leave fresh marks over old ones. Her wincing face was barely enough to whet his appetite, not nearly enough to satisfy him. 

“I see no reason for there to be any further dishonesty between us,” she said to him. There was nothing false in her fearlessness. Whatever deal Malik had made her, whatever promises he’d whispered into her ears (years ago, surely), everything that made her wholly human and been cleaned out and replaced with something else. Death was as close to her in that moment as it had ever been (surely she knew it, surely she felt how easily he could break her) but she stood straight and looked straight back into his face. 

“I agree.” His hands did not loosen but he did manage to pry them away from her body. “Do you fuck him?”

But Maria _laughed_. Her eyes went bright as she clutched at her mouth and her shoulders started shaking even as she bent forward. The only sound that escape her grasping hands were desperate sounding gasps and brittle little catches of giggles. When she could stand again, her face was pink and her face was wet with a stream of tears squeezing out through her bruised eyes. “Our kingdom could fall any day. A power as great as a god’s has been placed in our care. A man so inhumane he is called a ghost gets closer with every second. All this, and you are _jealous_?”

“You are stalling.” 

“Yes,” Maria said. There was no shame in the admission. It was only fact. “You have been naïve if you thought you were the only body keeping his bed warm.”

No, it wasn’t that. Malik-was-king and far-too-intelligent to fall into simple traps like love. He was not keeping time with Altair alone and there was no reason for Altair to have ever thought as much. It was only that anyone else that may have kept Malik’s bed warm in his place was fleeting. “Be quiet,” he said, “I wish to sleep until I’m summoned.” He went over to his bed and laid on it with his back to Maria—as much for privacy as to calm the shaking anger in his body.

\--

Once, so very long ago now, Malik had lived in the harem with his mother. There had been other children there but Malik had been the sole male heir the whole of his life. Even his mother, who had been highly favored after his birth, had only ever had one other child: a girl. Karida had been his most constant companion in those long-ago days when he was still too young to know the ugly truth of the world. Years had passed since he left the harem to seek education elsewhere, even longer in the immense passage of _things_ since he last spent the night with his sister’s calm breathing at his side. 

Once upon a time, he had lain away in his bed trying to fall asleep without his sister’s sweet breath keeping time next to him. But that had passed, the way all fickle and changeable things from his childhood.

Karida did not often speak to him now. Very rarely had he ever stopped and talked to her. Still, one of the harem guards arrived at his door with deep apologies as he stammered through saying that his sister had been ever-so-insistent that he come immediately. So Malik pulled on a robe and went to the harem. The women were all tucked away in their sleeping quarters (by order of his mother no doubt who believed sleep was the only necessity for youth and beauty). His mind was elsewhere entirely or he might not have been so shocked to see her: swollen pink eyes, wretched exhaustion in her body and the most pitiful expression of regret he had ever seen.

Malik waved his hand to send the guard away and stepped forward toward his sister. He had gotten taller than her in the years since their youth, so that when he put his arms around her she fit snugly against his chest in a way she had not since they were both toddlers. 

Her voice was frantic at the side of his face, “I swear I won’t tell, do not allow him to hurt me. I swear, Malik. I’ll pretend I never knew. Please.”

In all of his planning and factoring and imagining, Malik had never once thought that his sister would have been the one to discover Altair. While he had not ever expressly forbidden Altair from killing his sister (but he had forbidden him from killing his mother), the fact that he hadn’t was very strange. Malik was caught in a sudden confusion combination of gratitude for Altair’s restraint and aggravation at having to weigh the merit of his sister’s life versus the goal he hoped to achieve. Her death would bring a heavy inquisition that could not be so easily swept away. His mother would not rest until she discovered the cause of Karida’s death. Altair would be an easy scapegoat because his mother hated the man and not even Malik’s influence would save the man. 

Karida pulled back from him before he had decided for or against the idea of her death. She put her hands on her hips as she narrowed her eyes at him. “I assured myself that you were not the man he told me that you were. I assured myself of this and still I could not believe it. You and I were raised together!” 

Malik considered lying. He had done it before—either outright or through omission—but he was still undecided on Karida’s death. His only kindness was the promise he’d made to himself that he would never lie to a man he’d condemned to death. It seemed the very smallest of kindnesses. “You assume that means more to me than it does. I am not the brother that you once knew.”

“You aren’t,” Karida said. 

“How did you discover him?” Malik asked.

“I squeezed his penis in my hand. It was very much present when we had all been assured that it had been removed. Our mother would have his head if she had discovered it for herself.” Karida was smart but her bravery was slipping the longer Malik stood and looked at her without reassurances. “He told me that it was a secret I should not have discovered. You would really kill me?”

“Yes. It would not be such a difficult task as you think, Karida. I could think of a dozen reasons that you had to die—I would call for a public execution and command the kingdom to watch. It has its benefits, surely. The story of my penchant for blood is well known but very few people know the lengths to which I will go.” Malik did not move, did not let his gaze falter once as he watched the color of her face change. 

“Altair knows,” Karida whispered.

“I could order him to kill you. He has gotten very proficient at it. While I cannot exactly ask someone, I am led to believe by the evidence that he manages to make it as painless as possible. It is better that he does not hesitate—an executioner would hesitate.” Malik sighed and found a comfortable place to sit. He watched Karida slowly drop to her knees in front of him, watched how she blinked away tears at the edge of her eyes. When they were young, he sang to her when she was unhappy. She had wrapped her arms around him and slobbered sweet-gratitude into his cheek. “It is important that you understand your life—however much it means to me—is no longer a guarantee. The secret you’ve been tasked to carry is a burden far more difficult than you think.”

“What has happened to you?” Karida whispered.

Malik stood up again, looked down at her—the sag of her shoulders, the splay of her fingers against the floor, the fall of her hair. He said, “war.” Then he turned away from her and went to Altair’s room.

The man was sleeping when Malik entered. Maria woke up when the door opened, jumping to full alertness with her hands out in front of her like claws. Altair rolled onto his back with a knife in his hand but grumbled when he saw it was only him. Malik said, “if the secret does not keep, kill her quickly. Do not allow her body to be discovered _here_.” 

Maria’s noise was wounded but Altair only nodded his understanding. Malik meant to turn and leave, meant to retire to his room and try to plot a way to adjust his trap to accommodate the new knowledge he had. But he found himself looking down at Altair’s sleep-loose body with the odd yearning for blood clouding his head. 

“With me,” he said before he could convince himself it was a poor choice. Altair followed him out of the harem, up through the quiet corridors to his quarters. Once there, he tore Malik’s clothes and bit his flesh and held him against the bed as he fucked him viciously.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i literally rewrote this thing no less than 8 times. i think i trashed about 20k words before I found something I liked.

Malik had made a trap but Maria set the bait like this:

\--

Altair was back-again with a fury in his body that seemed to be contained only by a thin layer of skin. He did not bang about with the door, or kick or scream or make a sound-at-all but there was violence wrapped so tightly around him, Maria was listening for the sound of something snapping-all-apart. 

“Did you not get what you wanted?” Maria asked from the dark. Her voice was small but it was loud in the silence of the room.

“You and I must know very different men if you believe that my wants are often considered,” Altair said. He fell into his bed without a pause but there was no great sigh of uncoiling tension. No, he simply lay still until he had forced his way to sleep and woke again in the morning without having to be summoned. When he was dressed-and-leaving, a moment of doubt caught him at the door. “What promises did he make you?” Altair asked.

Maria was groggy with sleep and distracted by hunger when Altair asked. The question itself was not a problem but the cautious-frightened way Altair asked as if he didn’t-even-want-to-know was troublesome. Maria stretched in her bed and said, “I would not accept promises from a man like Malik.”

“Because he would not keep them?” Altair asked. But he did-not-look at her when he spoke.

“He would keep his promise, exactly as he promised, exactly when it was most useful to him. It is not that. I would not accept a promise from him because he already holds too much power and promises hold great power.” By the time she had finished Altair was sneering at the door. He left with a half-realized grunt to let her know he’d return with food as soon as he was able. In his absence, she was left with all the many-things-she-didn’t know. 

It was not that Malik-had-changed because it was as inevitable as inertia. The small boy that Maria had saved in the market so-long-ago was as dead as the boy-Altair-had-been (according to Malik). The deaths of the lives-they-should-have-led had given birth to the same inevitable conclusion. Maria had once fought to temper Malik’s decisive indifference, to bring reason and compassion to his actions. She had not fought to preserve Malik’s eternal soul (if he had even been granted one at all) but to elongate his reign as king. All of the fevered plans they made in the dim midnight hours hinged upon Malik retaining control over the kingdom as long as it took to defeat the evil that had crept across the world and found a home in their land. In her absence, whatever compassion Malik had once been able to fake (for her benefit, perhaps) had ceased and what remained was cold-and-calculated. 

Emotion hindered many things, and Maria had made it a practice to leave her own emotions out of the bulk of her decisions. She understood the necessity of separating actions and emotions but she still _had_ the ability to feel. Unlike the things that came for them, unlike the King. (Even Altair still _felt_ things no matter how petty and transient they seemed to be.)

But her hips hurt when she stood and her skin burned from the scratch of clothes against her many wounds, but she crept her way across the room to the bed where Altair had slept. It was well-worn and richly-comfortable when she fell into it. Exhaustion got the better of her and she tucked her worries away to think on them.

\--

The dawn came and the sun rose. Malik sat at the edge of his bed with his hand wrapped around the broken skin of his upper arm where Altair’s teeth had exacted the revenge that his words could not. The skin was purpled with bruises and dried blood. The whole length of his arm felt tender when he moved it and perhaps that-had-been the goal. Altair was nothing (not anything in the world) if not efficient. He accomplished everything he wanted in a single tightening of his jaw.

_Take this hurt and take this rage. Take this confusion and take this jealousy. Take this last cry of my humanity as it dies and take the grief that I cannot afford to feel. Carry these many things in your flesh._

The idea was ridiculous. Altair was not without emotions but he was not blessed with eloquence. Even if he had understood the things that he felt, he could not have put them into words. Malik let out a sigh, squeezed his hand over the wound and let the burn-of-it ricochet through his body.

(Just one last time, just to remember how to feel _something_.)

\--

Altair brought her a mass of food in the middle of the day and left again without a word. By the time he returned (long after he had the day before) he was covered in a light sweat with a pink impression of a handprint across the front of his chest that was far-too-small to be anything but a woman’s. The indignation and frustration of the morning had given way to a sense of arrogant peace.

“I have been ordered to make friends with you,” Altair said. “I was told you had many things that you could teach me and I should show you the same respect I have shown my other teachers.”

Maria had been picking at the many scabs that covered her ribs and had to let her clothing fall back to cover her naked skin before she could think of an answer to the sullen condescension in his words. “I have been ordered to make friends with you as well.”

“Have you seen Robert fight?” Altair asked.

“I have seen Robert crush a man with his bare hands,” Maria said. “He takes the greatest pleasure in destroying his enemies but he often is sure to have to have the upper hand first. His men, however, are driven by only the word of their master. They would light themselves on fire if he ordered without a moment’s pause. They fear nothing at all in this world.”

Altair considered this and then motioned toward the false wall that led out into the tunnel beyond it. “Show me.”

Maria might have protested the impossible nature of showing anyone how to fight without fear when she had never been far removed from the feeling herself. Fear-still-nagged at her (even now as she walked ahead of Altair into a dim tunnel). Fear had been her constant companion these many years and the idea of living without it was as foreign to her as the idea of living with it was to those men.

Altair light a series of lamps in the tight space of the tunnel and then stood opposite her in a defensive stance as he wanted for her attack. Without a shirt, the long lean lines of his chest were an imposing threat like the bony rise of his knuckles. There was power in his body and her own felt badly used and sore. Maria set her feet against the ground in a sturdy stance and took a breath—there was no lack of fear in her chest, but the courage to press on anyway.

Her first strike was knocked back against her chest faster than she could see Altair move. Her second was deflected with ease. By the time she moved to strike him on his weaker left side, he caught her arm and pinned her against the wall with her arm twisted behind her back. 

“Perhaps we should try this in a different fashion,” Maria said. 

Altair stayed behind her, body close enough to give off a fog of heat but not close enough to feel the drag of his bare skin on hers. He said, “What good are you to me if you cannot even fight? He told me that I could not win this fight without you, that you have served him with greater loyalty and for less reward.” Altair shoved her arm hard against her back and the wrench of pain made her bite her own lips rather than cry out. In the next second he released her and stepped away. “He said I could learn from you.”

Maria turned around, did not give Altair the satisfaction of rubbing her sore shoulder but stared at him head-on. There was no fear in him (not even a little) because he had assessed her and deemed her the very opposite of a physical threat. And her own weaknesses were many: her bruised body, her shorter and lighter stature, and the lack of formal fight training. Her own skills were good enough to get by but against a man who had been reared to end a life they were useless. There was no physical weakness that Maria could exploit and Altair _knew it_ as sure as he knew anything. 

(Oh-but-Maria could not-abide-a-bully.) 

She said, “Malik came to me when his father died—we were _children_ then and he said: bring the traitors to me. I slipped in-and-out of a hundred doors searching everywhere for the men who had betrayed his father and when I found them, I climbed the castle and whispered the words in his ears. I was there when they broke to bloody pieces and begged forgiveness. I was there when they drooled the story of a little-thieving-child who had taken the Apple from them.”

Altair’s stance shifted from dismissive to a slow-burning-fury and it did nothing to lessen the shame-and-guilt on his face. 

“I saw them dragging you up the castle steps like a _dog_ with a rope around your neck. That is all you have ever been, Altair. Just a dog the King decided to keep to serve him. I have _my_ freedom.”

Altair shoved her against the wall with a vibration of violence running all through his body. His arms and shoulders and jaw were tightening-tightening and she thought he could have crushed her bones if only he’d tightened his hands a fraction more. His voice was a _hiss_ against her when he said, “I have endured far worse than your petty insults.”

“Whore,” Maria whispered against his frown. She expected him to hit her (welcomed it even) but he bared his teeth a moment and then shoved away from her. He went out-toward-the-cliff and not-back-inside when he went. The swift and quiet shuffle of his bare footsteps were the only sound she heard as the darkness hid his retreat. 

Maria’s hands were shaking when she looked at them and her arms were bleeding where he’d rubbed the scabs off the burns. The lamps were going out one-by-one and the sudden clench of darkness made the confusion of fear in her chest almost unbearable. She went back toward the comfort of four walls.

\--

The world went on with relentless ignorance. His advisors—shrinking aged little men—pestered and pawed at him for an audience. Malik stood because every seat he took aggravated the sharp bruises Altair’s fingers had left on his body and the unpleasant tweak in his back that refused to be eased. The advisors stood in a close circle around him with anxious faces and weathered hands held in constant wringing.

They said, “sire, this matter is most troubling. The discovery of the spy proves there are weaknesses at our borders.”

Simple logic dictated as much, but Malik did not bother to refute them.

“The assassin’s rescue is a far greater issue,” said another. “It proves that we cannot even control affairs here. He was able to sneak past dozens of guards, within running distance of the castle itself. Sire, you must understand that our kingdom cannot afford to lose another King. There are no heirs.”

Oh-and-it-began anew. Malik set his teeth in a tight clench and let them exhaust their throats with the spill of useless words. When they drew to a curious pause (a momentary quiet bought not by the end of their worries but by a fresh worry that he had not responded), they were all staring at his face. The lolling-wetness of their eyes was an obnoxious feeling of being squeezed too tightly. (No, it felt like a trap.) 

“Sire,” the most fearless man said.

“The matter of the spy does present several troubling problems. Our borders have not been as secure as we would like for some time. I fear that the conspirators that escaped justice will find an ally if given enough time.” Then he looked at Rauf—the youngest of old men—who had bothered him yesterday about the matter of the assassin who undermined Malik’s rule and escaped justice at every turn. “Assemble a group of men you trust, bring them to me to approve and I give you leave to hunt for the assassin.”

The anxiety on their faces did not relax. Malik stepped forward and they scattered like vermin, staying close but scuttling out of his path. “I will think on these things.”

They left him in peace for the remainder of the day but their ignorant worry nagged at him in the common spaces until he shut himself tightly in his own room. He expected Maria to have found her way behind the tapestries that hung around the walls but it was Altair that crept out of the shadows at the edges of his room. He was still-dressed like a boy-slave but his body moved like a trained-assassin. 

“I did not send for you,” Malik said. 

Altair punched him in the arm, where he’d dug his teeth in and drawn blood only the night before. The action was so utterly-removed from the carefully cowed-behavior that Altair often showed that the shock of it was greater than the pain. Malik relished the rush of adrenaline that the combination of surprise and pain gave him and then moved to return the attack. The fight was brief—Altair was far more practiced but Malik had an advantage the other man could not match.

There was not enough wisdom in Altair’s whole body to yield to inevitable defeat. Even when Malik had pinned to the ground with his face to the stone floor he did not stop fighting for his freedom. The effort scraped his bare skin raw and left him gasping from exhaustive-wet-sweat. Malik pulled a dagger from his belt and leaned forward so his knees dug into Altair’s forearms and the weight pushed his cheek against the stone with enough force to bruise it. 

“Understand that I will not hesitate to kill you when you are no longer useful to me,” Malik said. He put the knife where Altair could see it and the man did not even react to it. There was no pause, no momentary shiver of mortal fear but the long-growing quiet rage that Malik had set fire to all-those-years ago when he put shackles on Altair-the-boy and sent him away to learn-his-lessons.

“Then do it,” Altair said. He went still at last, “I will not fight you.”

(Malik thought of Maria, laying against his side while the sweat cooled on their bodies and the strange almost ticklish pleasure of having her left him feeling magnanimous and _pliable_. He thought of her fingers on his skin tracing letters-and-shapes while she spilled all the secrets of the kingdom into his ear. He thought of her caution when she said, ‘they’ll find you out, Malik. Someone will see you for what you are if you aren’t careful.’ She had meant to call him a liar, surely, to point out that the deception he’d held over his kingdom for years would crumble eventually.)

Malik did not relent but consider his options for a moment. It had been a tactical maneuver to put Altair-and-Maria together (only now). Maria had always been smarter-and-more manipulative than Malik could have hoped to be. Her clever mouth and her sweet-faced-innocence had drawn more secrets from men than all the blades and fear that Malik possessed. Malik needed her to drive Altair into a frenzy, he had planned to set her loose on the man because it would take more than _skill_ itself to defeat Robert.

He had not anticipated _this_ outcome but perhaps he should have. Maria had never-thought-fondly of slaves or the practice of keeping them. She had incited the castle servants to riot when she was still very young and he was still creeping out over the harem walls to see her in the market. His father had punished the servants and sent them out in destitution and Maria had raged-and-raged for weeks over the ordeal.

“Are you so easily broken, Altair?” Malik asked. He pulled back enough to allow Altair the space to roll onto his back and ran his two fingers across the raised red ridge of the mark the stone left behind. “I have spent years assaulting your arrogance and you have not stumbled once in the face of so many torments but a single woman insults you and you fall like a child.”

Altair rolled them and Malik allowed it. He landed on his back with Altair crawling up over his body, grabbing his elbows to pin them down. It was the very same as the many times they had rolled naked in his bed and his body responded with the same grateful enthusiasm it always had. “Swear to me now that I am free when Robert is dead.”

“Or what?”

Altair leaned over to get the dagger that had dropped when they rolled and put held it tight in his fist. “Or I will stop allowing you to win, and you will know exactly what the men you have sent me to kill felt the moment before I ended their lives.”

Malik had once wondered if his father—in all his great stupidity—had been afraid in the moments before he was surrounded and murdered by the whole of his most trusted friends. Malik had wondered if he’d looked at their faces and seen them for what they were or if his father had been too stupid to know the death that came for him until the very-end. Stupidity had never blinded Malik from the knowledge that he was creating a monster when he sent Altair out to kill the men he could not afford to execute. 

There was a moment of pause when Altair’s resolved strengthened (driven by desperate wounded pride) just before Malik pulled him downward by the back of the neck and kissed him. Oh-and-Altair kissed him with all the same fervor that he might have killed him with, the two mixing together into a potent and dangerous mix so that Malik could hardly breathe under the assault. 

The dagger dropped and Altair’s hands were pulling his clothes away from his body in the next moment. Malik held onto him with slippery hands as Altair left fresh bites across the old ones he’d made the day before. 

They fucked on the floor.

And after, Malik rubbed his blood across Altair’s lips with the rough pad of his thumb. He said, “when Robert is dead, your debt will be repaid.” 

Altair did not thank him and Malik was not sure what sort of emotion moved briefly through him but it was pointed and unpleasant.

\--

Maria slept in the tunnel after she dragged the few things she’d been given to sleep on out and took the food Altair brought for her. When he returned—creeping through the dark—he took a moment to look down at her in the dark before he moved beyond her and into the room. Maria did not sleep until the room just beyond the false wall had lapsed into silence.

When day shone through the end of the tunnel, Maria sat at the end of it just beyond the fall of the sunlight into the opening. There was nobody to see her save for the birds who could fly the height of the cliff. Maria sat-and-thought of the many-many things that she had seen-and-done and what was still-left-to-do. 

The conspiracy (as Malik had called it once) started with Rashid and the Apple. He discovered its existence was more than legend and the need to possess such power came on him like a powerful greed. The greed drew in others with like minds that betrayed their king and country for little more than the promise of a great reward. Rashid wanted the throne and nearly had it within his grasp when he finally discovered the lost Apple—everything was within his grasp until Altair stumbled across a ball made of gold and took it for himself. 

“You bastard,” Maria whispered into the sunlight. Because the tight control Malik had over Altair unfolded before her like so many years of relentless conditioning. It would have started with an offer—to die or to repay the debt Altair incurred when his single action led to the death of the King. Every day the debt must have grown as Malik oh-so-slowly filled Altair with the need to prove himself. She had played-so-perfectly into his plan that she could not even be sure that it was her own insight that left her hissing seething-little-insults at Altair the day before. Malik could have whispered it into her ears in all the many days they’d spent together, he could have written it across her skin while she slept naked in his bed or even left it like bruises on her skin when he spit on her before the assembled crowd. 

( _I will build him up and set him in a cage-far-too-small and you will come and break the bars. Oh-and-when-he’s free, what a creature he will be._ )

It was well after dark before Altair returned. He found Maria at the end of the tunnel and went out farther than she dared to. He sat at the edge with his feet hanging over the sharp rock there and looked up at the moon rising in the darkening sky. There was a bruise across his cheek and several pink marks all across his chest and arm. 

“Why did you steal the Apple?” Maria asked. She got to her feet and walked over to sit next to him. He tolerated her presence like a cat with bristling fur. 

“It was gold. I was an orphan child and I was starving.” Altair looked over at her and cleared his throat. “Sometimes I am blind. Sometimes, I do not realize where I am being led until I arrive.” He threw a rock out and it hit the side of the cliff and fell with the rumble of so many other like rocks. “Malik does not own me because of a debt he invented. I do not follow him out of obligation—it is far worse than even that.” ( _Oh-so-much-worse._ )

Maria nodded before Altair could say the words. She said, “and perhaps one day he will finally earn the love we have wasted on him.”

Altair’s laugh was brief and brittle. It echoed through the mouth of the tunnel and whistled into the dim sky to be lost again. His shoulders were slumped forward, giving his body the appearance of sagging out into the nothingness beneath his hanging feet. It seemed at any moment he could lean ever-so-slightly farther forward and fall freely into the jagged face of the cliff. He said, “I do not believe in miracles, Maria. Malik is many things—good things, bad things—but he is not a human thing.”

“He was,” Maria said. She scooted over to lean her sore shoulders against the rock at the side of the tunnel. “When he was a boy. When I met him, he was the same sniffling, frightened little boy that every lost child was. He laughed and cried and bled like all boys do. He was not born without a heart.”

“Ah, this I know. He blames the war—the war that he has not seen, the one he does not take part in. He sits in his castle and sends his men to die. He sends me to kill the generals and the city leaders and merchants with too much power. But he does not see the bloodshed and the destitution that plague the land. He sees only his castle and the glory of his city. How could war have killed him when it has yet to touch him?” 

Every word was more insightful than Maria would have believed Altair capable of. There was no doubt in her mind that he had been crafted to be a weapon—probably not trained or taught in any way other than methods of fighting and survival. She would have been shocked if he even knew how to read. Her breath rose-and-fell in a sigh and she said, “War did not kill Malik’s heart. He cut it out himself the night Rashid was executed for killing his father. Rashid was a trusted advisor—a friend. He was as much a father to Malik as his own father was, in a way. Rashid was one of his teachers. Malik used to speak of him with such awe. But there was no denying that it was Rashid that killed his father.”

Altair was looking at her as if he’d only just seen her for the first time. At her face with the garish looking gash still scabbed black and crusted and at the marks on her arms from the ropes. He looked at the brand on her forearm and reached out to touch it with his first two fingers. “How could we love a man like this?” he said.

Maria flexed her arm, let Altair explore the old wound as he wanted and watched his face as he did it. There was no revulsion or pity as his fingers lid across the strangely-smoothed raised mark. There was only wonder at their own insanity. “I spent six months with Robert de Sable. I have seen what true barbarity is and Malik is not capable of it. This I know.”

Altair pulled back and cleared his throat like pushing the very thought away. There was a faint pinkness along his cheekbones and it made him look so terribly young. It hadn’t even occurred to her before to wonder at how old he really was but now she thought he could not have been very old at all. “We will see.” Then he was moving away, climbing up to his feet and heading back toward the small room where he slept.

\--

Malik had learned to climb in the harem when the days had grown longer-and-longer with every passing moment. His Mother had been in a state of constant worry as soon as he learned to walk and she kept after him with dogged determination. The other women had been jealous (he remembered that) but never-ever when his grandmother could see. Their jealousy was a blind eye when he found a good handhold in the mighty wall that kept the inner yard of the harem safe from the city beyond it. He climbed-up-and-up and out to look on the freedom that would be his one-day.

When he was only a boy with the inevitable weight of his future keeping his spoiled little feet fast to the ground, standing at the top of the great wall had been a sweet wind of blessed freedom. He remembered the smell-of-the-day, spices and dirt. He remembered the sun bright-as-a fire ball grinning down at a little boy’s accomplishments. 

His mother had shrieked at him and the other women who had allowed it and demanded that he return to her right-away. Malik remembered how hard her hands had been when they grabbed him up and how she had smacked him for his insolence (for the worry she’d felt). But there had been many days that she had not found him at the top of the wall or when he slid off the top of it, out and into the city beyond.

It came to him as he sat at the top of his castle with all the many trappings of his station as king left far beneath him. He’d secured them in a puddle in a locked room and climbed to his freedom far beyond them. Here, at the top of the world, he could see the whole of his city, the great stretch of it covered in little buildings and markets. He could trace the path of the scholars that Altair-so-loved and the guards that were patrolling the streets to intimidate information out of the citizens. In his own courtyard he could see the men training to grow stronger, the visiting dignitaries, and the rich-and-privileged men crowding in little clusters to entertain themselves. 

He saw the servants moving in circles as they attended their chores. He saw the solid citadel of the harem standing out against the rest of the castle. The heart of his kingdom was kept safe in those walls, the future secured there. Oh-and-he’d sent an invitation to a force he had never seen with his own eyes to come and try-to-take-it.

There was no _knowing_ the number of people that would die in the coming battle. There was no _knowing_ the cost this incursion would amass. His people had grown content with their meager freedoms and complacent in the years since he had found and executed the last of the traitors still within the kingdom. The streets were quiet while the war kept raging just beyond their borders, festering in dark spots far-from-here. 

Malik closed his eyes, drew the smell of the sun-heated stone in and spread his arms out around him. There was no fear in his chest as his body tipped forward. There was no sense of mortal panic or terror as the sure grasp of something solid slipped out from under him. His body was in a free fall and it felt like a dull spot. There was no freedom in the motion, no escape as he plummeted unrestrained to the earth below.

(But he thought of Altair: young and stupid as he clung to Malik’s arm and tried-so-hard to talk his way away from the ledge. Altair had said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was his, I didn’t know what he would do—I was just hungry. Please, I’ll do anything, anything at all but don’t make me do this, I’ll serve you forever, I’ll give you anything, I’ll—’ Malik had Altair on his knees on a wooden plank poised above a cart of hay. He’d had him with tears in his eyes begging for his life because he was _afraid_. Malik had only pulled him up and turned him around and told him to jump. Fear had shrunk Altair’s lanky-long body into a miserable huddle but he had thrown himself off the end of the plank. Malik remembered the sound he made, the sharp cry, and then the long silent drop.)

Malik hit the hay with a quiet thump. The sharp stop made the twinge in his back feel like a fresh knife of pain. He rolled out to get his feet on the ground and made no attempt to explain himself to the horrified stable boy that stared up at the sky above him. He just picked his way back around to find a decent place to climb back into the window of the room where he left his things.

By the time he was dressed-like-the-King (he was) again, there was a gray peace in his chest. He opened the door and called for his advisors. His orders were to reinforce the borders and they sighed-with-great gratitude because they didn’t know the White Ghost had already broken through. They had no idea what was coming, no idea how close it was. 

\--

Maria got stronger in the narrow tunnel, grew fat again on the ample food that Altair brought for her in the mid-day. She spent her time teaching her body how to move quick-and-quiet and practicing with the array of weapons she found hidden in the tunnel. There was a set of white robes kept there as well and she ran her hands across the small stitched places where Altair must have been wounded. 

Altair returned to the room later-and-later in the evening until by the end of two weeks he dragged himself in after midnight and lay down in his bed without even the most passing attempt to converse with her. He hadn’t been much of a conversationalist after they admitted their mutual affection for Malik. 

Maria wondered at that—tried to figure out if he were embarrassed or perhaps jealous that Maria had gotten to see a side of Malik that Altair believed he had yet to see. Maria started watching him more closely. In the morning when he woke, his hair was sticking up on his head and he had to stretch his tired body before he could make it move. At midday when he brought her food, he offered it without a word but did not shy away from the touch of her hands or avoid eye contact. No he looked at her with the same placid obedience of well-behaved livestock.

At night, when he returned to the room with fading marks across his skin he was covered in sweat and layered over with exhaustion. Maria hid herself in his bed so he could not avoid her and was surprised when he only pushed her farther to one side and curled up in the same manner he always did. 

“Has Malik been calling for you?” Maria asked.

“No,” Altair said. Then he told her to be quiet and settled himself into an uneasy sleep that made his body jerk and twitch and his hands clench up in fists. Maria rubbed his back, felt the long and thin raised marks that blended too easily into his skin to be seen clearly. Whenever she put her hands on him, he settled back to sleep and when her hand slipped away he woke her with his nightmares again.

Maria left him and climbed the side of the cliff, the wall that surrounded the castle and the tower that took her to the king’s rom. She slipped through the window and crawled across the floor and up to the side of the massive bed that Malik often slept on.

He said, “you did not come when I thought you would.” 

Maria sat with her back to him and said, “did you have Altair whipped?”

The silence that followed was too-long for innocence and Maria felt a gasp of pain in her chest that she could not ignore. It welled up into her throat like a hundred-furious-stings and it took every ounce of willpower she possessed to keep her silence. Malik’s hand touched the soft-short fall of her hair. He said, “yes. I could not have pulled off the deception without some manner of public punishment. He understood this.”

Of course he did, because Maria had understood exactly why she had to be branded. She understood why she’d run for her life through the kingdom, only narrowly escaping through the borders and into the sands between this kingdom and the next. Altair must have understood why he had to be whipped and what part it would play in the greater whole. “Did you ask his forgiveness?”

“No.” Malik was moving behind her, the motion of his body pushed the bed against her. Then he was on the floor at her side, shoulder leaning against hers as he looked at the same window she was looking through. “I would not insult him. I saw to it he was given something for the pain and that he was treated by a competent doctor in the aftermath. I changed his bandages twice when I could get away without being missed. I even allowed him to stay in a prison cell so that he did not have to go into the harem weak and wounded.”

“You are too kind,” Maria said softly.

“I am as kind as you are. It is only his body that I offend. You did not attack his flesh but his heart—which of us is worse?” Malik was looking at her in the darkness but Maria could not bring herself to look back at him. She allowed him to touch her hand and even let him cup his across it but she could not touch him back. 

“If you truly believe that you have done nothing to offend his heart, you are either purposefully ignorant or you are stupid.”

Malik did not reply. His silence was as damning as an outright confirmation would have been. Maria pulled her hand away from him and he said, like it was such-a-marvel. “I expected you to hate him. I thought that you would be revolted by his loyalty in the face of such despicable treatment. I thought when you discovered how fully he loved me that you would laugh at him because it is such an unfortunate weakness. I did not think that you would become an unneeded guardian for him. Altair is not innocent in all of this, he did not fall blindly into my trap.”

Maria got to her feet, felt anger under her skin like crawling-things and turned back to look at Malik in the low-low light of the still-burning lamp. There was no attempt at innocence on his face but the guilt of a man who _knew what he’d done_. “Altair had _no choice_ , Malik. Do you understand this? You have never _allowed_ him one because you would never have allowed him to become equal to you.” 

Malik’s mouth opened with a sliding-little-pop sound and Maria put her hand up to ward off his words. “Enough,” she said, “these things will keep until after Robert has been defeated. Tell me if your incompetent army has seen signs of his movement. When I left him, he was mobilizing his elite men to march on your castle. He may be in your city even this day.”

“I have heard nothing to indicate this. If he is coming, he has not yet reached the walls of Masyaf. Have you been successful in training Altair to defeat him or have you been sidetracked by his innumerable woes?”

“I told him what I know to be true. He does not require _training_. And you have given him a cause to fight for that is more appealing than vanquishing an evil you did not even see fit to tell him existed. I told Robert the Apple is in the harem. He will come at night, sneaking through the rooms and lighting your family on fire. Your mother, your sister and your wives will all die before he even begins to look for the treasure he came for.” Maria meant it as caution but Malik’s face remained solidly impassive for the whole of her warning. When she finished he merely blinked.

When he spoke, he said: “When I have word that he is in Masyaf, I will move my mother to a secondary location. The other women will simply have to have hope that Altair’s speed and strength will not fail them.”

“I suppose there are worse things to put your faith in.” Maria pulled back when Malik leaned forward to put his hands on her legs and he shifted up onto his knees and caught her by the waist before she could evade him. His hands were sure and steady but they did not pull her roughly or against her will. She folded down to fit into his lap, spread her legs around his body and rested her knees against the cold stone on either side of him. Her hands went easily on his shoulders as his hands ran up her ribs. 

She expected an attempt at sex but not the way his arms went around her and his face pressed against her shoulder. Her body was small against his. His skin was hot through her thin clothes. Her arms were around his shoulders and she stroked his hair with the fingers of one hand. His sigh was a shudder in his body and the tight-ball of radiating tension was oh-so-painful to feel vibrating all through him. 

Malik said, “I have missed you, Maria. Do not lose faith in me yet.”

If she were a better person, perhaps a stronger person, she would have pushed him away and told him that she had no use for men like him. But her cheek molded across the top of his head and she said (oh so quietly), “earn my faith. I do not give it cheaply.”

There was no sarcastic rebuttal. Malik breathed steadily but shallowly against her skin. He left a foggy wet mark on her breast before he looked at up at her face. There was a pinch in the center of his forehead and an aged weariness in his cheeks. He said, “if you find that I am truly lost, please do not let it be Altair that ends me. He would do it if it were just but please spare him that final insult.”

Maria nodded and Malik pulled her close again and held her there. Slowly-they crawled their way back onto his bed and slept like they had as children. His warmth and the bulk of his larger body comforting her in a way that nothing-else-in this whole world had ever managed.

\--

The sun rose (again, again) and Malik found himself alone (again, again). It was not such an odd occurrence given that he was often alone. The nature of his deception (of everyone, of the whole of his kingdom) necessitated isolation. He rose and called for the servants that attended his every-little-need (often left sitting around with little or nothing to do). They bathed and dressed him and he went to breakfast to amuse the varied men that came to dine with him hoping to receive favor from him. 

After, he received new information from the network of beggars and cripples that gathered it for him. They had not-yet-seen Robert but said that there was a rumor of a white man riding at the head of a host of as many as twenty men that had frightened the civilians some distance away. It was the first Malik had heard of Robert’s arrival and the news spurred something molten and hateful in his chest. 

After lunch, he sent his nagging advisors away to amuse themselves with the many problems of the kingdom. He went to the harem and found his mother lounging out in the sun with a circle of beautiful women doting on her and the fortunate she had to have given birth to a son. They envied her the power that her lucky womb had given her. Malik interrupted their stories with a sharp, grating sound of clearing his throat.

Mother, full of eternal ethereal glow (the glow of pride-and-power), turned her head to look at him. Her skin was darker than his father’s had been and her hair was black-as-ink. Her eyelashes were full and her nose was small with a sharp slant. But her lips were always twisted in a smirk and he thought that everything-awful about him must have come from her (sometimes). There was more intelligence in her eyes than he could have found in any other woman in the whole of his harem. “Yes, my son?” 

Malik waved his hand and the women scattered along with the individual servants that attended them. Several had willowy-thin eunuchs that moved with speed but a few had young girls that stuck close at their sides with grateful appreciation. Malik took a spot next to his mother but he did not lounge with the same ease that she did. 

Altair was across the open yard with his sister, shading her from the direct rays of the sun while his own naked shoulders turned pink. She was napping, stretched out and unconcerned with the many eyes that looked upon her with varying shades of concern and disbelief. 

“I have no business,” Malik said when his mother’s silence grew as pointed as her longer fingers that reached out to poke at his arm. “I only wanted a moment’s peace.”

“There are many girls here that would happily give you more than a moment’s peace.” She sat up so that her words could be quieter and fit nicely into his ear. He looked over at her when she leaned in close to his side, “you have to take a woman lover soon, Malik. Our kingdom cannot be so dependent on you. If these girls do not suit you, look for another.”

His teeth were stuck too tightly together to make words. For a half-second he thought that maybe his mother had discovered the nature of his secret (not that he had taken Altair for a lover in the aftermath of his public shaming. That had never been much of a secret). Karida had half of the wits of his mother and she’d worked it out already. 

Then his mother clucked her tongue at him. “You have always been such a sullen child, Malik. Even when you were a baby you could not be soothed. Come now, if you cannot do it out of love then motivate yourself out of obligation.”

Malik looked at her and saw her devious smile before he let out a sigh and shook his head. Her laughter was bright-and-bubbling but quickly extinguished. When her hand slid across his shoulders it was with all the authority of a mother reigning in an unruly child. He allowed himself to be pulled closer to her body. He said, “I fear you won’t forgive me once you know what I’ve done.”

“Is it important that I forgive you?” she asked. 

“Shouldn’t it be?” 

Mother pretended to consider it and then shrugged the worry away. “You are the king, my son. You are far more worthy than the man that came before you—if mistakes have been made, if missteps have been taken it cannot be worse than those committed by our last king. You are better than your father, you will not fall.”

It was not faith that she put in him, but the full strength of her demands. His mother had grown contented and fat on the obedience of the whole of the harem and it showed in the greedy way she ordered him about. But Malik conceded her the victory (as little as it was) because he would need to whisk her out of her cocoon as soon as news of Robert’s arrival reached him. “I will not fall.”

And across the yard, Altair looked at the ground as Mother looked over at him. The action was so swift and so fluid that she did not even seem to notice that he had ever been listening to start with. “Stay a moment,” she said, “enjoy your harem, and enjoy the many lovely sights it has to offer.”

If she noticed the way he watched Altair only, she did not mention it.


	3. Chapter 3

Malik set a trap and Maria laid the bait but it was Altair that had to deliver the death blow.

\--

It was important that Karida had not come to him with whimpering-simpering-apologies and sweet-little-tears full of tender pleas for her own life. No, Karida had cornered Altair in a long hallway with both of her hands like claws and her face set in a grimace so deeply reminiscent of her brother’s that it had taken Altair aback for a breath. 

Karida said, “I am not the fool my brother believes me to be. I found you out. There is something far worse coming. It will come here, in this harem where you and his spy are, and I will not be offered up as defenseless fodder to slow the progress of the coming invasion.” 

It was far too late for that. But Altair had still been smarting-with-hurt and twisted-around with a fury that had no name. Karida was the only full sibling of the King, the only one that had ever meant anything at all to Malik. (These were the words the King himself had said. The days before he ‘discovered’ Altair’s ‘indiscretions’ and had him whipped before an assembled crowd of offended nobles. The reason he had handed Altair to Karida personally and told her to teach him humility.) There was nothing good-or-kind in Altair’s chest when he agreed to train Karida but the sharp-and-certain knowledge that she would never be prepared for the force that was coming. 

Altair trained her for days with vengeful spite. He took the greatest joy in knocking her to the ground. He laughed at her sore arms and her wobbly legs. He filled himself with pride at the tears in her eyes as she struggled back to her feet in the narrow-length of her room. He smirked at the determination on her face because he-knew-as-certainly-as-he-knew-anything that she was going-to-die.

But Karida did not falter. Karida did not give. 

“You are going to die,” Altair said to her two-weeks later when the rage had tempered out into something even at last. His body felt like a burnt out husk, the way it might have felt after weeks on the road away from the whispered-reassurances of the King’s smooth-voice in his ear. It was a feeling that preceded a deepening panic he had never-been-able to overcome. (That was coming too, wasn’t it? That was going to come for him in the middle of the night when the distance from his room to Malik’s side seemed oh-so-short and the prospect of staying away seemed far-worse-than-submission.) 

Karida was coated in sweat, stripped down to a pair of pants she had stolen from one of the boy slaves as a length of cloth tied around her breasts. There were bruises on her chest and stomach, scratches and cuts here-and-there from her attempts at mastering the use of a dagger. All her eyes were darkened with exhaustion in a way that did nothing to diminish the anger that had so long sustained her. “You would know better than I, since you are my certain death.” She did not relax out of the defensive posture she had assumed.

“The man that comes, he will most certainly kill you. There is no glory in throwing yourself uselessly in his way. You complained of being nothing more than fodder to slow his progress—these meager tricks you’ve learned will hardly slow him a second longer.” Altair stepped forward and she swung the dagger at him with too much force. It was a simple matter to tear it out of her hand and dodge the punch she attempted to land against his body. He pinned her against the comfortable bulk of her bed. 

Her body was smaller than Malik’s. Her face was rounder than his, smoother from years kept in captivity—away from the sun and the stress of the war. There was not the physical strength in her that Malik had, nor the deadness in his eyes where emotion had once been. Karida was still _alive_ and her sharp bleats of aggravation and pain were a chorus of defiance against the inevitable briefness of her remaining life. She did not still under him but bring her knees up to squeeze at his ribs with more force than her arms had ever been capable of. She hissed at him like this: “and what would you have me do? What choice do I have but to _try_?”

“Hide,” Altair said.

Karida laughed in his face. It shook her body as she arched under him and the knees that were only a second ago trying to squeeze the breath out of his body were doing little but hanging on. He relaxed his grip on her arms. Her face was pink with something between amusement-and-pain and he could not figure out where her tears were from. She said, “name one man who has seen through my brother’s mask and lived. I know who he is now. If I do not die in the coming invasion than he will find a reason to kill me.”

“Malik will not kill you.” He had the chance to do it and had laid the decision at Altair’s feet because he could not bring himself to touch upon the guilt of it. Altair might have killed Karida if she proved too dangerous but that idea was laughable at best.

“Malik will not kill you. Malik will not kill the spy he sent you to save. Malik will not kill our Mother until he can replace her. All others are forfeit.” Then Karida pushed him back and he stood at the edge of her bed with the pink marks from their struggle as raised bumps across his skin. “I am not afraid to die. I am only afraid to die uselessly. Find a purpose for me in the coming fight, Altair and I will fulfill it gladly.”

“Do not give your life so blindly to a cause you do not understand,” he said. 

“I don’t give it to a cause. I give it to my brother, who once deserved such a sacrifice. I give it to you, who should understand far better than any other what kindness death can be.” Then she waved him away and Altair left her.

Maria was in his bed when he went back to the room and it was only the steady-warmth of her that kept him from crawling back to Malik on his hands-and-knees begging for some respite from the doubt that he could not control.

\--

When Maria could not stand the abrasive silence from Altair a moment longer she launched an attack. Actual words might have worked (eventually) but what Maria had managed to cobble together from the many observations she’d made of Altair (in a short few weeks) was that nothing got his attention so quickly or efficiently as physical action. So she found a comfortable place to lay in wait and launched herself at his back when he came in the door. 

It was a tactical maneuver to corner him when he was tired from a long day (and those days grew longer and longer) and unarmed. He had taken to slinking in with his shoulders slumped and his body pushed to a point of exhaustion that did nothing to help him sleep peacefully. There was a pitiful moment of shock before Altair slammed her back against the wall and it was more than enough time for her to strengthen her hold on him to withstand the impact. 

The fight was brief (painfully brief) and ended as soon as his hand reached over his own head and felt her crudely cut hair. He said, “Maria.” 

“So you can speak,” she said. 

His hands were large on her arms as he pulled them away from his neck. She loosened legs from around his body and dropped down to the ground behind him. He turned around in the dim light of the last burning lamp. “If I sleep, will you attack me again?”

“If it is not our king calling for you, who is keeping you occupied and leaving you in such a state of exhaustion?” Her hand motioned at his body.

For a moment, Altair was thinking of a lie. The effort smoothed his face into a mask akin to the one he had when they had only just met. He dropped back onto his bed and said, “I am training Karida to fight.”

If she had been given an infinite amount of time, Maria might never have arrived at that conclusion. Her mind had been grasping at illicit affairs (born of jealousy and hurt). If Altair had confessed to spending his time fucking the girl out of spite it might not have been as shocking as the quietly offered honesty. “To what end?” Maria asked. 

“She does not wish to die without a fight. It did not seem like an unreasonable request.” Altair rubbed at the fresh red marks on his shoulders and neck where Maria had grasped at him. “Where do you go in the night? To warm the bed of our king in my absence?”

“In a single breath you surprise me with your generosity and repel me with your pettiness. I have been to see Malik because there is a monster riding toward us! A monster that I was sent to invite, one that you seem to have no interest in learning about and one Malik cannot seem to concern himself with!” (Was that why she had gone to see Malik? It did not seem to be the reason that eased the aches and pains in her body as she pulled herself up the sheer side of the tower. It did not seem like the reason she went again-and-again to his bed.)

Altair saw her moment of weakness and granted her the small kindness of not calling her on it. He said, “Malik does not concern himself with monsters beyond ordering me to kill them.”

“You cannot even sleep.” Maria took a step forward and regretted it the instant Altair’s long arms pulled her down. His hands were tight on her thighs until he had her in his lap with her knees spread invitingly across his lap. Then his hands were on her hips with each point of his fingertip digging into her body painfully. 

“Is that why you’ve made a place for yourself in my bed?” he hissed. “I don’t need to be coddled by you.”

“Don’t you?” Maria said back. Her hands were on Altair’s bare shoulders but she did not shove him back. No, she spread her palms across the hard bulk of his shoulders and dug her short-sharp nails into his skin almost hard enough to draw blood. “If I was so unwanted, you could have easily pushed me out. If I was so unneeded why do I wake every morning to the weight of your body against mine and the coil of your arm tight around my chest?”

“This is why I do not speak to you. You do nothing but twist words around until I can’t even think!” Anger made his skin warm and Maria could not stop herself from pressing the pad of her thumb against the jumping vein at his neck where his pulse thrummed harder-harder-faster. 

“I don’t twist words, you are simply too stupid to understand them.” But how-or-why had they fallen into this argument? How had she found herself spread across his lap with the strength of his body fit so nicely all along the slimness of hers? And the span of his hands was a delicious clench of anger-like-desire that tricked her body into something she’d simply set aside years-ago when Malik kissed her farewell. 

Altair shoved her off his lap, knocked her onto her side and nearly managed to pull himself free from her grasping hands and strong legs. He said, “I am not stupid.” But he did not move fast enough to get free from her grasp when she pulled him back over her body. There was a white anger in his face that was unlike anything she’d seen before. It was more private-and-more-painful than anything he’d shown her before. For one brilliantly-clear-moment, Maria was sure that he was going to wrap his hands around her throat and be done with the whole thing. It mutated the moment Maria hiked the length of her servant’s dress up and the white flesh of her bare thighs pulled at Altair’s bare waist. 

His kiss was the same violence as his hands. Her mouth felt bruised-and-numb before he released her again. She raked her nails into his flesh and he did not even flinch at the feeling of it, did nothing but push the length of her clothes out of his way. When he entered her it was merciless and she bit his forearm before he pushed her back against the bed and left marks like bruises on her arms. 

They fucked desperately but briefly.

The ragged-wounded-wetness of his breath against her neck was set in sharp relief to the numbness of her body when they finally stilled. They were caught in a momentary truce, everything had paused and awareness had not yet fully returned. It was not her that moved first, but him. He pulled away from her with far greater care than he had shown only seconds before. 

She could not even move herself to shock when he ran.

\--

Altair ran-for-it with the taste-and-feel and echoing-sound of Maria caught on his tongue-and-skin and resounding in his ears. He climbed the steep face of the cliff in the dark and threw himself out into the city with a chorus of worries-and-fears at his back that pecked and nagged at him. For a moment, his body was shaking too hard for him to still. Things were spiraling-spiraling because he had been ordered oh-so-long-ago now never-ever to touch and never-ever to want any other person. His life and his will and his body had been bound to Malik for so long Altair had forgotten-all-about the terrifying exhilaration of freedom. (Even if only borrowed, even if only temporary.) 

Altair stole clothes to cover the pale strangeness of his bare chest and slipped through the sleeping city before him. It was easy to find his way in the dark, easy to find the door to the building where the scholars bunked together in mediocrity and pious poverty. Altair found a bed left unoccupied and slept in it with the ratty blanket pulled up to cover his head. 

He did not wake again until the sun had travelled half-through the sky and the weight of the afternoon heat made the cocoon he’d made for himself far too suffocating to stand a moment longer. When he woke, the dreary lethargy of his body had given way to a loose feeling of energy. The groggy moments between sleep and full wakefulness afforded him a sense of peace largely missing from his mind these days. 

“My son,” the withered-old-scholar said to him when he crept out toward squalid little table they served their bits and bites of food. “You should not have abandoned your post.” There was pity in his voice that was not often present. The scholars had made a bargain with Altair after he had taken the time to save a number of their members in the many cities he’d been dispatched to. They knew of his actions and neither approved or disapproved (through careful and methodical ignorance) but they were very rarely ever moved to pity for him. 

“I am easily replaced,” Altair said. “I hope you were not too troubled on my behalf.”

The old man’s face cracked into a toothless grin, all gums and chapped skin. He shook his head and reached out with his slim and bony hand. “The King’s wrath is hollow,” the man said.

Altair snorted at that assumption. He bit back the rebuttal that denied the words based on the blood that Altair had spilt with his own hands and instead found a comfortable seat and let his head hang. There were guards prowling the streets outside the open doors. “How so?”

“I grew up in his father’s reign. I watched many innocent men fall to his stupidity. That king’s head was filled with many voices and he was ruled by them. Their will was his will and our kingdom was driven to starvation and chaos. Your King,” the man said as he reached to poke Altair’s arm, “is not his father’s son. Innocent men are not slaughtered here. His justice is swift and merciful. You are evidence enough of that, my son.”

“My father was executed by King Yasir,” Altair said. It hardly mattered to him now; just another injustice stacked all together to create the whole of his life. Malik had told him once that his father had been an innocent man and it was as close to an apology as the man might have ever been capable of. Perhaps it had been meant to be some sort of consolation, to know that Altair was not the son of a criminal, to know that his father had died for no reason at all. Or maybe he had offered him that bit of comfort as a means to inspire him to fight against the tyranny of the men who had murdered his father. 

“Many men fell to King Yasir, many who did not deserve to die. It is often said the greatest good Yasir ever did was to die. This will not be said of your King, Altair. It will not be said of you. Things are dark now but they will not always be. Do not lose faith.” 

“I’m starting to wonder if I ever had faith at all. I have been an obedient dog of my master all these years—to what end?”

The old man sighed oh-so-quietly and offered no answer. He only reached across the narrow table and patted Altair on the back of his hand. His nod was nothing more than a meager attempt at reassurance. But the old man’s ignorance was as obvious as the cloudy-white blindness in his eyes. Altair moved to pull his hands away from the condescending touch but the old man’s hand tightened and held him in place. “If you have questions, seek the answers. Questions weaken and answers strengthen—even the ones that are painful to bear.”

Altair moved away and the old man let him. “Thank you for your kindness.” For the bed and the brief respite it had offered him.

\--

Maria climbed into Malik’s bed with Altair’s handprints on her skin and smell of his body still clinging to hers. She took Malik’s hand in hers, slid it up along her thigh and leaned in against him to whisper the filthy-truth into his ear. His groan-was-nothing like anger and everything-like-raw lust. 

Malik knew how to work her body better than Altair—they had spent months into years of their lives learning the secret places on their bodies. Malik had a mastery to his every motion where Altair had been driven by painful things. Malik did not hold her down but lavish her with wordless worship. 

“He has never been allowed to touch anyone but me,” Malik said in the afterglow. There was an edge of danger in the words, an unspoken or unrealized threat. Perhaps Malik himself was not even sure what sort of feeling he had about this act of defiance. There was no violence in the way his hands touched her skin or the way he looked at her. 

Maria rolled her eyes, “You are as jealous as he is. The two of you are perfectly made for the other.” She crawled out of his bed, stickier now than when she came and grimaced at the many aches of her body. But she would return to the bed Altair slept in and wait for him to return from wherever he had gone. “One day he will realize where your weakness lies, Malik. What defense will you have against him then?”

Malik did not move to follow her, did nothing but lay in his bed and luxuriate in the filthy smell of their sex. His face was still pink from exertion but he looked otherwise untouched. “Altair knows where my weakness lies. You underestimate him—many do, so I do not fault you. Robert is close, Maria.”

“How close?” Maria asked. It was stupid how the very thought of the man made her stomach clench and her skin crawl. It didn’t seem right that the world itself hadn’t been moved to a lurching illness just by the looming nearness of the man. 

“Within a matter of days,” Malik said. “I will supply your favorite weapons.”

The cheerful banter (should anyone call it such) that had lifted her spirits only moments ago turned stale and thick. The air was hard to breath and the darkness of the night seemed to foretell some terrible fate. Maria looked out at the blackness (she thought of Altair, thought of how he had left with frantic blinded energy) and said, “make amends, Malik.” She did not stay to hear him deny the need for them, but slipped back through the narrow window and climbed down-and-down until she slipped back into the harem through the false wall and curled up into the smell of Altair’s body in his pitiful bed.

\--

There was no retribution, swift or otherwise. Altair slipped back into the harem from above (but not below) landing softly in place around a dim corner. He moved through the quiet halls of mid-afternoon until he found Karida in her usual place out by the walls meant to protect her. 

Karida did not smile at him but frown at the lateness of the day. “Insolent little slave,” she said, “where have you been?”

Altair did not answer her because he had never-ever (not once) spoken to her outside of the safety of closed doors. Instead he ducked his head in apology and tried his best to look chastised. 

Karida looked down at him and sneered before waving her hand at him, “away with you. You look as if you’ve been ill half the night.” The words were loud enough to carry and Altair did not miss the way the King’s dear mother sneered all the harder at her daughter’s easy-forgiveness of Altair’s absence. 

He went, with shuffling-sickened footsteps but he did not retire to his room. He found his way to hers and hid there among her fine things where Malik would not think to look for him. The day went on as a crawl until Karida returned to her room (early for her) and said, “I suppose absence did not make my brother’s heart grow fonder of you. Has he discovered me?”

“No,” Altair said. “He knows nothing about this. He would not care even if he did know—except that it might amuse me for a moment.” 

“If you aren’t sulking in here because he’s jealous of the time you are not spending in his bed, then why?” She sat with her full attention turned to him. The insult she delivered had been so seamless and so utterly flawless that it took Altair a moment to figure out why a hot-flash of useless anger rose and fell in his chest.

“I am not sulking. I need your assistance to shirk my duties. As I am primarily your servant, it’s easy enough for you to declare me unfit to serve you for a day.”

Karida laughed, “has my brother gotten tired of thinking of increasingly ridiculous reasons for calling you away. He really shouldn’t bother being so coy—the women already knows what he wants you for and as long as they are outraged and content to know his twisted carnal desires for you they won’t think to question why you’ve gone missing.”

“Malik does not know about this,” Altair said. “You can tell the women whatever you wish. I need time to search for something and I cannot afford for your mother to complain to the King that I’ve been lax in my duties.”

That brought a quick death to the smirk on Karida’s face. All her arrogance and all the pointed barbs about his usefulness in Malik’s bed deflated in a great whoosh of lost air. Her face went soft and she said, “what are you searching for that my brother cannot know about?”

“A golden ball.”

Karida’s eyes went large at the words and she had only just opened her mouth to say something (perhaps to say she knew exactly-where it had been hidden) when a sharp knock at her door interrupted her. Malik’s voice requested entrance and Karida shot upright as Altair scuttled to the side to slip himself into the shadowed corner behind a raised divan. 

“Yes?” Karida said. 

Altair could not see them, but hear the footsteps as Malik entered the room and the quiet draw of his breath as he took a moment to investigate the room and his sister. Karida’s breath was faster-but not panicked and it could easily be mistaken as fear (from her brother’s dismissal of her life, for instance) or aggravation (at being cornered). 

“Did you have a purpose? Or have you simply come to look at my room?” 

Malik sighed and cleared his throat. (Surely whatever he said next was said out of a matter of obligation without any real emotion behind them at all.) “I have been stupid, Karida.”

“That is putting it mildly.”

“We were children together here,” Malik said. “You and I played games together in these rooms, in this harem. I made you a promise, once, that no matter how far I travelled and no matter how much I learned or how heavy the responsibility of ruling became that I would never forget that we once held hands in our sleep and snuck sweets until we sick from it. I haven’t kept that promise, Karida. I barely even remember who I was when I made it.”

Karida’s little breath was a wounded noise. “You cannot be so different, Malik. It is only laziness that troubles your memory.”

“Perhaps it is,” Malik said. (But it wasn’t, that was the truth hidden in his voice.) “I made a mistake. I threatened your life when I should have sworn an oath to protect it. I’m sorry.”

The silence that followed the words was an infinity. Altair held his breath against discovery, flattened his body along the ground as best he could and distracted the burning need in his lungs with the pinch-pains against his thighs as he dug his fingers into his own skin. 

When Karida spoke again she said, “I remember you as the boy who climbed the harem walls after dark. I remember you with dirt in your hair and dust on your feet. I remember you with handfuls of rocks and useless bits of things picked up from the world beyond these _walls_. I remember how you brought them to me and told me the stories of how you’d found them. You brought me tales of merchants and conmen, of lunatics in the streets and beggar women crying in hunger. You regaled me with the stories of our father’s guards in the streets in shining armor and the cry of rebellion brewing in the discontent poor. I remember you so clearly as that boy that I cannot bring myself to imagine what must have happened to that poor child. You had so much life, Malik. You had such dreams, and such ambition once. But you’re an old man now, at my door on the eve of the final days of his life asking for forgiveness that you neither need nor want.”

“I understand if you cannot forgive me,” Malik said.

“I do forgive you.” Karida’s words were fast-and-slippery. There must have been tears on her face when she said it.

“I don’t deserve it,” Malik said. There was the soft touch of a kiss against Karida’s forehead and the muffled sound of a hug before Malik was leaving and Karida collapsed back against her bed with a barely-contained sob. When Altair crept out of his hiding place, she was red with tears with her fist between her teeth as she tried not to cry. 

Altair did not know what to say so he stood and said nothing. Karida looked at him after a moment and said (watery-and-thin): “Malik buried something in the room we had as children. I slept there still when he came in the middle of the night. I’ll give you the time you need to find it if you swear that you will protect my brother.”

Altair nodded and Karida waved her hand to send him out-and-away.

\--

Maria did not pace but her body went still in self-defense. Her mind was raging with the many-many things that she had never taken the time to sort out and put into proper places. The chaos had worked for her, it had allowed her the freedom and the wisdom to see things in others that she could not be bothered to see in herself. The advantage of discovering those hurtful little weaknesses had saved her life (countless) times. Now it seemed a poor exchange for the many things that snuck their way into the forefront of her mind in these final hours. 

Robert-was-coming. The trap that Malik had started piecing together the moment he looked down at his father’s murdered body was finally-finally being realized. The idea of defeating Robert had been enough to soothe her before. The promise of ending the bloody vengeance that started with Rashid had driven her relentlessly through the years but on the eve of their final victory, Maria found herself with a lapful of regretful thoughts.

She had sent Malik to make amends, but the apologies that Maria needed to offer were already too late. In the silence of the room, she said them anyway. Sorry to the men she threw into the path of soldiers chasing her, sorry for the lies she told, sorry to the men whose confidences she betrayed, sorry to women whose charity she abused. Sorry a thousand times for an infinite number of indiscretions and ugly lies. 

Altair came back to the room with a grim frown on his face. He said, “has Malik been here?”

“No,” Maria said. “Should he have been?”

“We will see.” Then he sat with his back against the wall. The careful distance between their bodies was as loud as the silence that they lapsed into. The distraction Altair provided was a welcome one. He did not look-at-her directly but over her shoulder and head and down at the floor in front of her. 

“Robert is close,” Maria said. “Malik estimates we have only a matter of days left. Are you ready to fight?”

“Yes.” But it wasn’t the ugly rebuttal she was expecting.

“I’m not sorry for what happened last night,” Maria said. Because there was plenty of time left in her life to think of the many things she was sorry for and having sex with Altair did not number in the list. “I think, given enough time, I could love you. If time and death do not grant me that opportunity, I am glad that we had at least that brief moment.”

Altair made a sharp-dismissive grunt and then rubbed both of his hands over his short-hair like he was trying to scratching away the thought of such things. Then he looked up at her with such a young-man’s face and a pink sort of embarrassment, “It was not a fair sample of my usual skill. If we are not granted any other opportunity I feel I should apologize for the crudeness.”

“It was honest, at least.” Maria might have said more on the subject but the door was pushed roughly open and Malik was standing there. Altair looked up at him with a dim-white shock hidden by a resolute impassiveness. 

Malik said, “A moment,” to her. So Maria picked herself up and slid out through the false wall and walked until she could not hear the phantom dullness of their voices any longer.

\--

Altair stood up because having any manner of conversation with Malik required the added superiority of his full height to balance the way Malik so easily made him feel inferior. He squared his shoulders and braced himself for whatever was coming.

“I will not insult you by asking for forgiveness I do not deserve.” No, Malik was careful in that way. Honesty was prized far above any other sort of kindness. It was not even the first time Malik had spoken such words to him. They had come in the aftermath of the first man Altair was sent to kill, when Malik seduced him into his bed and swore him to fidelity while offering nothing in return. Those words had haunted him in the darkened prison cell when his back was a flame of pain and his whole body was curled-up-tight from humiliation of being publically whipped. 

“Then why are you here?” Altair asked.

“You know better than any man, better than even Maria, what sort of monster I have become in these many years. You have seen me at my worst, have borne the brunt of my wrath, have kept promises that I had no right to ask of you and have returned again-and-again to my side. You have been warmth and hope that drove away uncertainty and darkness. Know that regardless of what terrible things I have done, what unthinkable crimes I have committed against you, that I would burn my kingdom to the ground if you asked it of me.”

“What good is that to me?” Because it wasn’t _fair_ and there was no words that he could pluck out of the sifting grayness of his mind to explain to Malik how unwelcome such an admission was. “I don’t want our kingdom in ashes,” Altair said.

Malik shrugged. 

And so they went on as they had for all these years. Malik said-nothing and Altair was left to fill-in-the-quiet-spaces with his own conclusions. It was an unsatisfying cycle of things left unsaid. Altair drew in a breath and let it out again, “Robert is at our doors and this is the best declaration of love that you can make? You—the great king of many words? You, the cleverest of men? These words are the ones you mean to have me remember you by in the afterlife?” Altair made an exaggeration of rolling his eyes. 

“You assume that I love you,” Malik said.

Altair caught him and shoved him against the wall. The resounding thump of Malik’s body shook the very room around them but the man-himself only looked up at him dismissively. “I have tasted the words on your tongue when you were too great a coward to say them. I have pulled them from your body when you could not give them freely. That you love me has never been a doubt; that you deserve what you feel is so rightfully yours has been a disgraceful uncertainty.”

Malik kissed him and Altair let himself be pulled in against his body again. They stumbled-and-fell, landed against the floor as they had time-and-time again. It was easy to fit against Malik, comfortable and well-known. They clung to one another with awkward need and collapsed into a shared damp space in the aftermath.

Malik was naked to the skin when he said, “I do love you,” as if the words had been scoured out of his chest. “Do not fail, Altair. I could not bear it.”

\--

Maria returned after Malik had gone. Altair was sorting through a pile of weapons that had not been there before. He tested the weight of a short sword and a dagger and found them both to his liking. 

“How will Robert come?” Altair asked. 

Long, long ago (far longer than even seemed real), Maria had asked Malik why he had planned to lay a path straight through to his harem. It was meant to be a fortress of security—built to house the women that gave birth to the rulers of the kingdom. From behind the high and thick walls of the harem, the whole of their kingdom’s fate was decided. To invite an attack upon the harem seemed like an unimaginable stupidity. Who would ever respect or trust a king that could not ensure the safety of his wives, mother and young children? But Malik had said, ‘ _there will be no doubt then. The people will know beyond any doubt that the men who attacked the harem are the very scum of this earth. They will believe any motivation I attribute to such disgusting men and our victory will ward away any other who happens to hear the story of a great power kept hidden in my harem walls._

“Over the wall,” Maria said, “in the darkest part of night when the guards grow sleepy and the yard is silent. He will crawl through the long halls and set fire to the sleeping women and when the castle is glowing with a screaming red blaze he will search through the debris to find the Apple.” 

Altair considered the words. “I will bring you a guard’s uniform. You will need the anonymity to invade their ranks. Can you throw knives or shoot an arrow?”

“I can do both.” Maria said, “with great accuracy, even in the dark.”

Altair nodded again. Whatever Malik-and-said before he left, the words had restored a balance to Altair that had slowly been fading in the past weeks. He was not a scared-and-confused boy but the ruthless creature that had thrown itself onto the gallows at her execution. “When you see Robert, do not take even a moment to hesitate. When he has fallen, run to Malik and bring him to the harem.” He tested the weight of the weapons once again and then turned to leave the room. 

“Where are you going?” Maria asked.

“There are many things left to do. Rest while I am gone.” Then he swept out of the room and left her alone.

\--

Altair slid through the hall in the early-morning dimness and found Karida half-asleep in her bed. He woke her with a shake and motioned her silently out of the room. She followed him for a moment and then pulled him toward the room she’d spoken of only the day before.

“It was here,” she said. Her delicate foot pressed against the edge of a loose stone square. Altair pried it up and used the dagger to cut through the earth until he struck it against something hard-and-metal. “Is this what they are coming for?” Karida whispered. 

Altair pushed the stone back before he opened the filthy sack to see the Apple in all its glory. It was a dim and dirty ball made of gold, possessed of no obvious (ethereal) value save for the weight of it. Even that was not as great as he remembered it to be. Karida squinted at the grooves cut into the sides of it. “It does not seem worth the trouble it has caused,” Altair said. He rolled it from the bag into his bare hand and felt the vibrating warmth of it. A slow-invasive light came out of the center of the ball and threw itself full force into the air above their heads. The hologram flickered-and-wavered before it grew solid and sure.

Karida’s face was bathed in golden light as her eyes went round and her mouth hung open. She said, “is that our world?”

The globe spun lazily above their heads with bright-bright spots spread out over a mass of continents that seemed too innumerable and vast to be real. “Yes,” Altair knew (as surely as he knew anything). Then he rolled the ball off his hand back into the dirty sack. “If you meant the words you have said, I have thought of a use for you.”

“I meant the words,” she said. 

Altair nodded, “then listen closely.”

\--

Maria woke to the unwelcome weight of a guard’s uniform being thrown on her sleeping body. Altair stood over her with sweat sticking in his hair and a catch of blood at the corner of his mouth where a bruise was swelling his already full lips. His hands and arms were streaked with dirt and he smiled at her before he pulled a strap that held a crossbow at his back and dropped it on the bed next to where she lay and a quiver of arrows to go with it. 

“You have been busy,” she said.

“Dress yourself, there is not much time to secure the spot I made vacant for you before someone comes and wonders why it has been left unprotected.” Then he went to the weapons she had sorted out and chose a few blades that he liked best. 

He dressed himself with greater speed and efficiency than she managed and stood there in the long white robes of the great-mystery assassin that had long plagued Malik’s kingdom. He fit the short blade into the sheath on his back, the sword into the one at his side and several slim throwing knives into the many available pockets. There was one final weapon that he strapped into place over his sleeve and tested. The blade shot forward out of its place along the underside of his forearm and protruded easily from the missing space where his left ring finger had once been. 

When Maria was dressed and had secured the weapons at her back, Altair motioned her out through the tunnel. They climbed the face of the cliff up into the quiet streets of the late evening and met a cluster of scholars who mumbled news of invaders under their breath. Altair ducked his head and shuffled at their pace until they passed close enough to the castle wall that he could break from their formation. They were quick-and-quiet, running across the top of the aged wall until they reached the tower that looked over the harem’s open courtyard. Altair pointed her to the open space where a streak of blood was the only marker that anyone had ever been there.

Maria went easily into the place and watched as Altair climbed downward to the yard and hid himself in a blind corner. 

\--

Altair had fallen in love once—not so very long ago—with a woman he was not sent to save. She had been a convenient body to use, a chance meeting when he was in a strange city running for his life from guards that meant to kill him. Any girl might have screamed in sudden terror at being accosted so firmly and with such unwanted familiarity as he grasped her with. One moment she was walking and the next he had knocked her into an open doorway and caught the pot she’d been carrying only a second before. His footsteps slip-slid to the side and her body against his provided delightful cover from the men who were hunting him.

A bell was tolling over their heads, alerting all men that an assassin was running freely through their streets. But the girl had only looked at him with wide-open eyes and fright-pinked cheeks. 

Altair found her again a day later to apologize for his terrible behavior and again the next day and the day after. His mission kept him hiding in broken buildings and listening to the inane chatter of so many men with such self-importance. But her smile warmed the days and gave him the patience he had long lacked.

A feeling of madness overcame him in a matter of days. It wrapped his body up in intolerable warmth and drove him to her side time-and-time again. He found reasons not to kill the last man he had been sent to kill (time and time again) just to delay his departure. There hours-and-hours of lost time wrapped up tight in the memories of her. When he was an idiot falling in love, he had been blind with certainty that she was worth the punishment he was sure to incur by loving her.

Her name had been Adha and she was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the man Altair had failed to kill. Malik had listened to the story with great indifference and pulled Altair’s body against his own. He did not whisper sympathy into Altair’s ears but, “your work must be swift, merciful and remorseless. Do not allow another innocent to die needlessly.”

It was a lesson well-learned. Altair thought on it as he crouched by a wall and waited for the devil-himself to come for a treasure that he would not find. The dark moved around him and the stillness played tricks with little bits of noise that amounted to nothing.

\--

Maria waited in the dark, offered hastily waved hands to a guard that was walking the perimeter and called to ask her if all was well. She tried to see the whole of the great wall of the harem but it was too long to see all at once. In the dark, every tickle of breeze felt like the cold-grip of certain death. 

For a long time, there was nothing but the knowledge that something was drawing near. She shook her body out a sore stupor from standing still for so long. Still nothing came. The moon crossed the sky over her head, the stars blinked with blurrily white eyes and the clouds drifted here-and-there. 

Still nothing happened.

\--

It was not Altair that saw the invasion when it came. It was not Maria’s quick eyes that caught the first invader as he came over the wall. It was Karida, hiding in her mother’s favorite chair that saw them first. Her scream was one single note that ended as quickly as it began. Then she flattened out of view again.

Altair rose to his feet and looked out toward the wall where the men were dropping on silent feet all around the courtyard. Over his head he heard the sound of a man’s last-gasp of bloody breath before that too went silent. 

There were men close enough to strike but he stayed his blade until the light-bristling crackle of a fresh-fire brought a blaze of light so sudden and bright that it blinded the intruders for a matter of seconds. There were many—a dozen, at least, perhaps as many as twenty—and in the center of them a man as tall as a monster with skin so white it seemed to glow even in the dim light.

Robert-the-white-ghost rose his arm to cover his eyes at the sudden bright pain that it brought and never saw the arrow that lodged itself into his thigh before it hit him. The shock of it brought him to his knees and Altair moved swift-and-sure through the crowd of bodies to deliver the final death blow to the man. 

\--

“Shit!” Maria screamed at the arrow that had missed its mark. Robert fell to his knees in the courtyard and Altair moved with inhuman speed but he still did not move fast enough to evade the men that had been long-trained to obey-and-protect Robert. The guards that had been there only a moment before were missing in the face of this sudden fight. Maria lifted the crossbow again and took a steadying breath.

Altair was a noticeable white blur in the center of so many bodies covered in thick armor. He had drawn one of his swords and was fending off the advancing knot of bodies with careful efficiency.

But Robert was standing again, the long shaft of the arrow dropping out of his hands as he grimaced at the pain. He was looking up-at-her with a grim smile on his face at being so surprised by her presence. His shout was an echo in French and his men moved, running full force at the pillars that led to where Maria was hiding. She ignored them and levelled her bow at Robert even as he dashed to one side. 

He called another shout in French and three of his men kicked at the high pile of sticks that had caught fire with such ferocity until they were scattered and the fire itself had blanked out into a grayness caught low to the ground. 

Maria shot a second time as Robert gloated over his victory and it caught him in the shoulder. His howl of pain was a celebration of success just seconds before three men pulled themselves up-and-over the edge of the guard’s long walkway. 

\--

Altair did not see the King enter the courtyard but he heard the jeer that Robert called after him. There were two men intent on running him through with the sharp and heavy end of their swords and it took too much of his attention to avoid such a death to notice much more. By the time he had dispatched them, Robert had the King pinned against the wall with one of his pale-pale white hands around his neck. 

Maria sent a body over the edge of the guard’s walkway over his head. There were two other bodies still struggling against her and six more of Robert’s men spreading out from the courtyard to the rooms beyond. The cries of the women that Altair had not-protected well enough were audible through the halls of the harem. 

The King was kicking his feet in the air, both hands grasping at the hand at his neck.

Altair set his feet to the ground and started running at Robert’s back with his short sword in one hand and his fist tensed and ready to lose the hidden blade. He might have made it—surely would have made it—if not for the sudden attack of still-burning stick aimed for his face. There was no time to change course with any degree of agility so he simply slid and landed on his back to avoid it. He looked up expecting to see the grinning face of another unknown foreigner. 

He didn’t expect to see Malik’s mother. He did not expect to see the dagger she held in her hand or the coldness of her words when she hissed, “I knew it was you.”

\--

Maria took a blow to the side that left her gasping for breath. She took another to the face that made her vision blink in-and-out and rang like a pulsing agony up and down her back. But she did not lose her grip on the sword she had. She swung it in her blindness and met flesh.

“It’s a woman,” one man said.

“I’ve a better use for you,” the other hissed. 

Maria shook her head to clear her vision and took quick stock of the situation. There was little room to maneuver in the narrow walkway and they were far-stronger than she was. One of them was bleeding from a long wound on his ribs and another had a gash down his face that did not seem to bother him at all. 

She could have fought them; she might have won. Instead she turned and ran, found a convenient corner and used her foot against the wall to throw herself onto the slanted roof of the harem’s sleeping quarters and ran in a high arch around the two men that were pursuing her, landed behind their backs and took off for the hallways-proper that fed into the palace beyond.

They were echoing footsteps at her back as she ran-like-hell. They were idiots at her back when she turned a final corner and dashed up steps they could not take at the same speed. The sounds of their bodies knocking against the wall was loud enough it should have roused the palace guards into action. Malik met her in the staircase, stepped to the side to allow her to pass him and drove his sword into the first man that barreled after her with a grim look of excitement on his face. The second moved fluidly into an attack but just as easily found himself falling backwards down the steps. Malik followed after him, stood over his groaning body and drove the end of his sword through the man’s throat.

“Altair is alone,” Maria gasped.

\--

Between one blink of his eyes and the next, Altair tried to find some hidden meaning in all the words that Malik had ever uttered to him. He searched through years’ worth of time scrambling to find even a wayward word that might have prepared him for the shock of seeing the King’s beloved mother wielding a dagger with deadly intent. 

(But there wasn’t one. There simply had never been such a moment. Malik’s unfaltering protection of his mother had been steadfast. His mother could not die, could not be threatened, and could not be harmed in any way. His mother was the heart-of-his-Kingdom, the woman who birthed him and the one whose significance had gone unquestioned for these many years. She ran his harem and therefore his household. There had never-been-a-moment of doubt, never been a moment-of-suspicion.)

Altair rolled out of the way of her dagger, directly onto a pile of burning embers and then up onto his hands-then-feet. He turned back to look at Robert’s curious glance over his bleeding shoulder. 

The King’s dear mother screamed in fright when he looked at her and ran from the men who had previously paid her no attention. Altair did not have the time to make sense of her actions when there were men attacking him again. 

\--

Maria ran back into the narrow walkway with Malik at her back. Altair was shoved back against a wall with three men attacking him at once and Robert was a giant of a man with one of his massive hands at—

“Who is that?” Maria asked before she could stop herself. The crossbow had fallen and the arrows had been thrown carelessly around by her quick departure. Malik was at her side with a gaping look of disbelief on his face. The person that Robert held pinned to the wall by the throat looked as much like Malik as the man himself. The ragged shortness of his hair and the hang of his clothes were nearly identical to Malik at her side. 

A scream of terror from beneath them interrupted what Malik might have said. He sheathed his sword long enough to drop over the side of the walkway and land against the ground. Maria followed after him, grabbing his shoulder and pushing him in through the harem toward the sound of the screaming. 

“Save your wives,” she shouted.

Robert turned toward the sound of her voice and the smile on his face was nothing short of murder.

\--

Altair bought his freedom with two well-aimed thrusts of his sword and one very lucky moment when the third man ran at him blindly and fell into the length of the hidden blade. The stickiness of their blood was a strange-wetness offset by his own leaking wounds. 

Across the room, Maria was fighting a man and Robert had dropped the king to the ground with a dismissive sneer. He said something that was not audible so far away. Karida (their king) tightened her body into a ball of submission. She stayed still as she gasped for much needed breath and Altair ran toward her again—ran to save her, to shove her out of the way of the harm he had put her in, ran to stop her from moving toward danger yet again—but she was on her unsteady feet before he made it to her. 

Robert was moving toward Maria, mouthing filthy words in a foreign tongue as he went. The man who was fighting against Maria fell to the side with a regretful-and-obedient motion. The shiver of fear in Maria was as pronounced as the wounded exhaustion in Karida.

It was Karida-dressed-like-a-King that drove a knife into Robert’s flank. It was Karida that twisted the hilt and shoved it up and in as hard as she could manage. It was her hands and her body that wrung the scream of pain and shock from Robert’s arrogant throat. She fell away, landed on her back across the soot-and-blood-covered ground. 

Maria saw the moment of weakness and threw herself forward against Robert, raised her own sword and drove it forward with enough force that it cracked through Robert’s chest and lodged there among his ribs. The man Robert had ordered to stand down only a second before was moving to kill Maria and but Altair reached him first.

Robert fell with white-disbelief on his face.

\--

“What did you do?” Maria shouted at Altair. At the body at his feet, at Karida who was gasping for breath still. Her throat was livid with bruises and swollen from being strangled. Maria might have demanded more but there was an echo scream from the harem. “Malik,” she said.

“Go, I will finish here,” Altair said. 

There was no time to argue with him, not time to sort out the inexplicable state of Karida’s disguise or the reason behind it. The scream that had issued forth from the sleeping quarters of the harem was joined by another and then another. Maria cursed as she picked up one of the many fallen swords and ran inward. Her feet slipped as she fell through the first doorway but her arrival had come far too late to save the woman that was lying gutted across the floor. 

Door-by-door she searched for the source of the screaming until she came upon Malik crouching over the prone body of a dying invader. The two of them were speckled in brilliant-blood with ghastly shadows playing across their bodies from the lamps that had been lit in the room. At Malik’s back a cringing crowd of women were clutching at one another in horror. 

“Are there more?” Maria said. “Did you see another?”

Malik looked confused at the words, as if he could not pull himself free from the grip of slow-death that he was pressing into the invader. Maria moved close enough to grab him by his thick sleeve and shouted the words again. Malik shook his head, “there were two and they are both dead now.”

“These women were screaming?” Maria asked.

“No,” Malik said. And Maria did not take a moment to ask him if he were sure. She turned back toward the hall she had come from and _ran_.

\--

The bodies of the dead were spread across the blackened courtyard like uneven hills. Altair crouched in the shallow spot of light he’d made from stacking the red-glowing sticks into a pile and squinted at the wounds on Karida’s throat. 

“You did very well,” he said. 

Her weary face twisted into something like a peaked smile, quirking at the corners and falling again as she panted for breath she could not seem to catch. There was sweat in the ragged cut of her hair and all across her face. The heavy clothes she’d worn to distract Robert were far warmer than her own. Altair used one of his throwing knives to cut it loose and spread the sweat-soaked fabric away from Karida’s chest to ease her breathing. Her eyes closed in grateful relief but the sound of her panting did not improve.

Altair frowned at it, at the girl and the wounds at her neck and the utter helplessness of his situation. He opened his mouth to offer her some words of condolences, (something surely brilliant) but the quiet snap of a stick interrupted him. He was turning before the knife landed against his skin, cut into the flesh at his side when it meant to bury itself into his back. His arm hit his attacker and knocked her over into the bloody dirt. 

Mother (Malik’s mother, always mother, never named) hissed at him as she rose back to her feet. “You filthy, filthy abomination! I will not let you drag my son into depravity any longer.”

The idea of Altair dragging Malik anywhere was laughable at best. Altair touched at the wound on his side and found it ragged-and-bloody. The free run of blood was more worrisome than the pain and Mother (clever, clever woman) saw that momentary worry cross his face because she was up again in the next instant. “Stop!” Altair shouted at her.

“I won’t! I worked too hard to put my son on his throne to have you take it from him! When you are dead, he will do as I say.” She attacked him again and it was not the crazed-wild attack of a woman who had only just discovered a thirst for blood. She moved with a dizzying degree of speed and practiced conservation of motion. Altair underestimated her and she cut into his robes across the front of his chest and drew blood again. “You, the great assassin—too scared to fight a woman.”

Altair drew his sword and held it before him. Mother smirked in amusement. “What work did you do to put your son on his throne? The King has found the traitors—the last of them lay dead at your feet.”

Mother laughed. “There were many traitors. I have spent my days mourning the men who I trusted, the ones who I picked out of a hundred possibilities. Rashid was the wisest and best of men. He would have taken our Kingdom farther than the idiot that called himself a King. He was a worthy man, one who could have ruled for years to come.”

Karida attacked her mother from the side, grabbed at her arms, clawed into her skin and reached for the dagger in her hand. At full strength, with every advantage, Karida might have been able to take the weapon from Mother but she was no match for her when she could hardly breath. Mother threw her to the side and Karida crashed into the fallen swords of the many dead men. Her wide-open-shock of pain was a silent-noise like the faint pop of a bubble. But Mother did not spare her even a momentary glance.

“I am the assassin,” Altair said. He dropped his sword. “I am the man who stole Rashid’s golden treasure. I am the man who killed his followers when they fled beyond the kingdom’s walls. I am Malik’s silent wrath. All these things I am, but I have only ever served one purpose.”

“I relieve you of your purpose,” she said. She moved to attack him and Altair let her come, let her slip in close enough that the red-glint of his blood on her blade caught in his eyes seconds before he grabbed her wrist. He wrenched her arm to the side and brought his left hand up into the soft flesh of her belly. The sound of the blade springing forward was far louder than the shriek of stunted outrage that echoed around them. 

Mother’s body went lax, her arm was around him in a mockery of an embrace and her face turned up to look at him with such-surprise. His hand was wet-and-red-against her flesh as her blood came around the length of his blade. 

“This wound will not kill you,” Altair said softly. “You will linger many days as your body starts to rot and swell. Fever will drive you to insanity, the pain will make you rave and scream and wish that I had the kindness you showed Yasir.” He cupped his hand around the back of her head and lowered her back into the ground. The blade came free from her body with a fleshy-sound and he retracted it safely back. “Tell your son the truth of your death and I will offer you mercy that I do not feel you deserve.”

Across the short distance Karida was staring at the red-soaked tip of a blade broken through her chest with both of her hands shaking as they cupped at the air around it. 

\--

Maria ran into a bloodbath. It was not the many men that lay dead but Altair’s body bent across Malk’s mother and Karida with her head falling back and her body arched to keep the sword that had impaled her from finishing her. Malik was at her back, knocked into her side when his slow-stop picked back up into a full-out-run. His body knocked into Altair’s and the two of them fell into a tumble of limbs. Altair did not defend himself put surrendered to Malik’s anger-and-confusion with both of his palms facing up and his words slipping and sliding together. 

Altair said, “ask her the truth, Malik. Ask your mother why your father died.”

Malik looked at his sister, not at his mother, at the blade that had thrust through her back and now stuck out of her chest. Her face was white with blood loss and pain. Her body was shaking form the effort of keeping itself up when gravity would inevitably pull her the last few required inches to her death. Malik did not go to his mother, but scuttled across the floor on dirty hands and filthy knees to touch his sister’s lax face. 

“Do not be afraid, Karida.” Malik said. “There is a better place for those who earn it. You have done more for me than I have ever done for you, sister.” He bent forward and kissed her face and her weak hands pulled at his shoulders and his neck. The brittle tightening of her knuckles did nothing to save her but left little-pink-impressions where they touched him. Malik’s hands touched at her shoulders and the weight pushed her down. 

“He killed her,” Malik’s mother said with a whimpering-red-smear on her face.

Malik was still across his sister’s still body. Altair was holding a wound in his side that was running fresh-red blood through his fingers. For a moment, Maria was certain that Malik would not lift his head, would not look at his mother and her accusations. She found herself moving slowly-but-surely toward Altair and could not understand if she meant to station herself in such a way to protect him or to kill him when commanded.

\--

Altair did not defend himself. He did not dispute Mother at all, but sat in the dirt and tried to cover the worst of his wound with the soft pads of his fingers. He was tired-now (more tired, perhaps, than he could remember being). Maria came, stood at his side with her weapon in her clenched fist and an uncertainty caught on her face that did nothing to reassure him. 

Mother lay in agony with her hands across her belly and red-blood-and-bits-of-her-body caught under her clenching hands. Her words were ugly slurs but they were getting weak from pain. 

Malik did not move but stay where he had been, head against his sister’s wounded chest, hands coiled in her clothing. The eerie resemblance they shared made the sight of him coiled over her look almost as if he were mourning himself. 

\--

“Let me look at your wound,” Maria said.

“No,” Altair said. It wasn’t an attempt at being noble that prompted his refusal but some deeper, more primal need to survive. They were caught in the silence that followed Malik’s mother’s last words. The sound of their breathing was the only audible thing in the room full of the dead. Even Malik had gone so still he seemed dead. 

\--

Altair pushed himself back to his feet. Maria was at his side, trying to pry his fingers away from the wound and he pushed her out of the way with his left hand before stooping over to pick up a sword from the many left on the ground. 

“Malik,” Altair said, “they will come. Your guards will storm this place in only a matter of minutes and we have no answer for the questions that they will ask. Our lives have been spent striving for this moment—do not let us falter now.”

But Malik stayed, on his knees, leaning over his sister.

\--

Maria punched Altair in the ribs, down and to the right of the wound and he released it with a yowl of pain that would have befitted a cat. She caught the torn open white fabric and ripped it further, exposed the ruined flesh beneath it. The wound was as long as her hand but it was not deep enough to have cut into bone. A surgeon would be able to sew it closed again if she could only convince Altair that running-for-their-lives was worth more than standing by Malik’s side.

Malik was the King. His word was law.

\--

Altair considered hitting Maria back but her quick-little-fingers were crawling into his flesh. He bit his lip and let her look until she was satisfied. Then she tore a section of his robes away and folded it twice over before shoving it against the wound and pressing it tightly to the wound.

“Hold it tightly,” she told him. Altair did what he was told because the alternative was accusing her of lethal stupidity. 

Malik stood up behind her. He had a sword in his hand that dragged across the ground as he stepped over to where his mother had fallen silent save for a few piercing cries of pain that broke through her trembling lips. “Was Yasir truly my father?” Malik said. 

“Yes,” Mother said. 

Malik nodded once and then lifted the sword and drove it through her chest. Her bleat of terror was cut off with a gurgle of blood and Malik did not even stay to see that her death came quickly (or at all). He was moving toward the doors of the harem. “The time has come for my kingdom to know who has served me so faithfully all these years.”


	4. Epilogue

Malik had set a trap, Maria had laid the bait, Altair was meant to strike the death blow but it was Karida that saved his kingdom in the end.

\--

Malik’s life moved in a chaotic catch-and-release motion and it had since the very first moments. Because he was age three with a squalling baby sister that he hadn’t asked for and a dozen mothers hanging around all the edges of the harem with their brittle jealousy picking at him all-the-time. His mother glowed-all-day-long with brilliant-achievement but his grandmother had looked at the new baby and sneered at it.

“Better it be born a boy.”

He was age five with Karida at his side and their hands-and-faces covered in dirt as they dug holes in the yard because-they-could and the because-they-wanted-to. Her giggle was bright as sunlight and there was nothing-nothing in the world Malik wouldn’t have done to protect her.

Age six he climbed the wall of the harem and stood at the top to look out at the city beyond it. Karida on her dusty feet was staring up at him while the mothers shouted at him to get down before he killed himself.

He was eight, free from the harem and racing through the streets of his glorious city. The smells-and-sounds-and-sight of so many things was more than he could make sense of. He was caught by an angry merchant, called a thief and nearly lost his hand save for Maria’s quick-and-clever intervention. She was taller than him and stronger than him. 

“I met a girl,” Malik whispered into Karida’s hair when they coiled up together in their bed. Her smaller body was an awkward fit against his growing one. Oh but her arms and her fingers could not be pried away from his body. 

“I’m a girl,” she said.

But it wasn’t the same (not even close). Malik didn’t bother to tell Karida that, didn’t take even a moment to break her heart but promised her that he’d bring her a gift the next time he escaped. And he went time-and-time again, over the wall and into the streets to where a thousand-different-men lived. He picked up stones and bits of broken pots. He filled a pouch with a hundred useless finds and carried them home to lay them into his sister’s hands and tell her all of the many things he’d seen.

Karida kept them all in a box. 

It was nine-or-so when he was sent to Rashid to learn the many-many things he’d need to know. Malik tolerated the lessons at first, and Rashid tolerated him in return. It wasn’t his mother’s anger or Rashid’s inspired teachings but Karida’s sweet-little voice in his ear saying, “teach me everything you learn. I asked mother and she told me I didn’t need to learn.”

Malik threw himself into studying the way he’d taken to plucking pretty things off merchant stalls for his sister. Maria laughed at him in the dusty broken buildings where she lived. Her face had been long-and-thin in those days. Maria said, “she is not your wife, Malik.”

Rashid discovered the purpose behind his fervent learning in the end, he sat with Malik on a bench and said, “you are teaching your sister.” Malik did not agree-or-disagree but Rashid made a noise like uncovering a great mystery. He said, “your loyalty to her is very strong, Malik. Loyalty is important when it is given to people who deserve it. Be careful about who you give yours too.”

At ten years old, Malik knew _without a doubt_ that there would never be a person born in the whole of the world that was worthy of his loyalty more than his sister. He did not put voice to the words and Rashid did not scold him but pat him on the back and fill his head with interesting-things-to-know that his sister-might-like.

Eleven was a boring stretch of time marked only by the changes in Maria’s body as she grew taller, her skin more fair, and her chest rounded. Karida, at nine, remained unchanged by the inevitably of age but Malik was no longer allowed to share a bed with his sister. 

Malik’s father-the-king was betrayed and murdered when he was twelve. The whole world was flipped sideways on him in a sudden rush of _things_. Rashid was at his side with slithering-sloppy condolences and harshly-worded advice. He said, “you are king now, Malik. Do not make the mistakes of your father. As I have taught you many things, I will guide you in this.”

His mother said, “you will be a greater king than your father.”

Karida had tears in her eyes and arms around his neck when she said, “who has killed our father, Malik? Who did this?”

Maria stood in front of him in the dusty rooms where she lived and nodded her head when he asked her to listen to the words of his kingdom to find the names of the traitors who killed his father. She had always known-everything, always been able to slip-in and out-again before anyone saw her.

Malik was twelve years old, seven months, two weeks and three days old when he ordered his first execution. Rashid had died screaming injustice, swearing that he had never-betrayed-the-King. 

He turned thirteen days before the guards dragged Altair up to him. The boy was filthy-with-dirt, starving to death and still snarling at him with a defiance and a fury that might have been the very first thing that made sense to Malik in all the long hours and days of his life since his father died.

“You have taken something from me,” Malik said to him. Oh-and-the-hate in Altair’s eyes was stronger and more powerful than the fear that shook his body. 

At sixteen, Malik had forgotten more things about his life before than he remembered. He was wrapped up in war when his sister sat next to him in the harem. She smiled at him and he did not smile back at her. The offense did not mean much to her—the girl who had followed him all the years of her life with one hand on his clothes and four fingers of the other hand in her slobbering mouth. Karida put a rock in his palm. She said, “do not forget me, brother. I have not forgotten you.”

By eighteen, Malik had sharpened Altair into a killer. By eighteen, he had secured Maria’s undying loyalty and wrenched a promise from her that left a livid burn across her skin. 

By twenty, Malik had seduced Altair into his bed.

By twenty two, Malik had forgotten every-single-thing about his baby sister who had shown him greater and more lasting loyalty than Malik had ever shown anyone.

At twenty three, Malik unraveled every moment of his life, plucked apart the things he had never questioned before. At how Rashid looked at him with such pride, at how his mother had groomed him from the very moment of his birth to replace his father, at how she had all but exploded with joy at the news of his death, at how she had cried for days when Rashid was executed. Malik pulled apart these things, pulled his mother’s words apart until he felt something like a dreadful certainty ease a calm across his body.

At twenty three, he picked himself up off his sister’s body and crossed to where his mother lay bleeding on the floor. Altair had done a sloppy job of killing her (oh no, he simply did not mean to kill her quickly but to make it last). Malik said, “was Yasir truly my father?”

His mother’s lying-little-mouth said, “yes.”

At twenty three, Malik drove a sword through his mother’s chest with Rashid’s words echoing in his head like so many breaking things. _Be careful who you give your loyalty to._

\--

“Malik stop!” Maria shouted before she could think-things-through. Altair was falling over in his attempt to follow her. Malik turned too swiftly and the three of them ended up colliding and it was only the fading strength of Altair’s arm and the wall at Malik’s back that kept them from falling to the floor in a great tumble of limbs. “We’ll never be safe again if you do this.”

“We were never safe to start with,” Malik snapped. “The traitors we have spent our lives chasing from this kingdom were living all the while in _my castle_.” Oh-and-Maria had seen this in Malik before, so very long ago now, the ripped-open wound and the rolling red blood of pain. “If we are to live the rest of our lives wondering who means to kill us next, at least we should be free to do it together.”

“How else will we explain what has happened in the harem?” Altair asked. “You could easily claim the invaders killed his mother and Karida but who killed them? The dead guards? Malik himself? There is nobody to take credit.”

The sound of footsteps was growing ever-closer as the guards that patrolled the castle were drawn to the sound of their voices. Perhaps they had discovered the dead men just beyond the King’s quarters and had followed the wet-red footsteps to the harem doors. Maria tried to think around Malik’s panic and Altair’s fearless bravado. She didn’t have the time to find a single word to dissuade them from acting rashly before the guards were upon them with drawn weapons and flickering torches to light their path.

\--

Altair found himself in the care of the King’s own physician. A curious looking man with knobby fingers and a gnarled smile who fussed at his wounds. He was given something to drink that made him feel gray and wobbly. Darkness slipped over him and he was helpless against it. 

By the time he woke up, the sun had risen and his wounds had been sutured closed and wrapped with fresh bandages. The whole of his body felt beaten and raw as he moved. There was a man sitting by the wall that was slumped over in a dreary sleep. He did not wake as Altair moved around the room but startled to half alertness when Altair went out through the doorway. 

The castle was furious with action. Altair was blindsided with a line of standing guards that demanded to know who he was and where he had come from. Instinct tightened his aching body into a spring and he reduced the men before him into nothing but their weakest points. It would not have been easy to overcome them and escape but it was nothing that he had not done before. 

“I am Altair. Take me to the King,” he said. He had been handed off to the physician as soon as the guards had been ordered to stand down and Malik had called for his advisors and full strength of his men to be woken up. Altair had heard nothing but the orders that the harem be searched for any further invaders. 

The guard closest to him sneered but took him by the elbow and dragged him down the hall toward the center of the castle where Malik stood. Maria was resplendent in fine clothes, standing at Malik’s side with all of the vehement devotion that had only weeks ago infuriated Altair. But the sight of her so close at Malik’s side brought a wash of comfort over him that loosened the aggravated tightness of worry.

Malik saw him and frowned, stepped past the advisors that were standing in a worried ring around him. He walked with resounding footsteps, his face nothing but hatred and anger. The guard at Altair’s side made a snickering sort of noise and shoved him forward but tightened the grip he had on Altair’s elbow to keep him from bolting. 

“We found this one sneaking around, sire.”

Poor man did not even see the punch heading for his face before it landed. The impact sent the man falling back and Altair only just managed to yank his arm free. Malik made a motion with his hand that sent the guard scuttling back to where he came and then he looked at Altair’s arm and then at his chest where the bandages were wrapped around him. “Do not allow them to touch you in such a disrespectful way again,” Malik said. “You saved our kingdom, they should grovel at your feet.”

Altair nodded and Malik clapped a hand on his shoulder and pulled him back over into the center of the advisors. Maria’s hand slid down his arm and her fingers curled into the center of his palm. 

\--

Awareness came slowly to the kingdom. The news of the massacre in his harem spread quickly but the story of the heroic efforts of Altair (the Assassin in white) spread much slower. Maria hardly featured in the stories that spread and soon fell completely out of the story. Malik would have ridden through his kingdom proclaiming her as a hero save for the fact that she put her hand on his arm.

“Leave it,” was all she said. When the harem had been cleaned and reinforced, she went back to it and the frightened cluster of women that returned to live in its walls. Malik urged her not to do it, told her that she had no reason to imprison herself inside of his harem. But she bit into the flesh of his arm and said, “your kingdom grows fat on the story of your assassin, Malik. But it is your wives that should have the greatest faith in you. They will be the mothers of future kings and if their faith is not strong than your kingdom will crumble. Let me fix what I helped to break.”

Altair had taken to hiding on rooftops and shallow ledges. He roamed around the hallways at night and avoided Malik during the day hours when so many others crowded around him demanding attention and orders. It was only in the darkest hours of night that Altair crept back to his side and burrowed into his bed. They went on for weeks in such a manner before Altair finally said, “I took the Apple, Malik.”

This he had already known. “What will you do with it?” Malik asked.

“Destroy it,” Altair whispered, “study it. There is a strange power in it that both scares and intrigues me. What would you do with it?”

Malik shrugged, felt how the motion made his skin drag against the bed and Altair’s body so close at his side. When he turned his head, he could feel Altair’s indecisive breath at his cheek. “I had the Apple for many years, Altair. I did nothing with it. I do not expect that I would change my mind about it now. However, whichever you decide, I trust that it will be the right course.”

Altair-did-not-believe it and that was perhaps what stole his arrogance at last. 

\--

Maria had persuaded Malik against speaking the truth of his mother’s unforgiveable crimes. Those words would have done nothing but harm and so they were smothered and kept hidden in the space between Altair-Malik-and-here where words had a way of smoldering unsaid. The women in the harem had not heard the confrontation, they had not seen the attack out in the yard so they were content with the explanation they were given.

In the absence of the king’s mother, there was a series of power plays as each woman tried to seize control over the others. Maria was not a fine woman, not made of proper breeding or possessed of the breath-taking beauty of the others but she was ruthless in a far more relentless way than they were. 

Maria did not wait for Malik to call for her, did not wait for him to visit her at his own leisure but sought him out and dragged into the harem. “Our kingdom needs an heir, Malik,” she said against his mouth when his hands were all over her skin. 

Again-and-again she sought him out while she worked to unify the women of his harem. They were foul-mouthed about the King’s affection for only one woman and his long-standing relationship with the harem-slave-turned-assassin. 

“You will never have a child with man like that,” they said when months had passed and Maria wasn’t growing fat with child. And another, “does he even know what to do?”

Maria chased Altair down over a series of rooftops and dragged him back to Malik’s bed by the long-red scarf that he often tied at his waist. “I need a child,” she said when she had them both captive in the same bed. “Or you will need to take an interest in your other wives,” Maria said.

Malik’s sneer at the words made Altair laugh low-and-naughty. “We will give you a child,” Malik said.

\--

Altair wandered for months, for a year, lost between the duties of his past and the uncertainty of the future. Malik was no idle in that time but caught up in restoring his kingdom to something of his former glory. The threat of the war that waged just beyond their borders was no less real than it had been for these many years but Malik’s ragged insistence on provoking it had faded. 

In the place of vengeance, Malik worked for peace. There were surely targets he could have named, men whose deaths could have benefited everyone but he did not call for Altair to do what he had been trained to do. Instead they languished in Masyaf—spent their days in a mindless repetition of things interrupted only by Maria’s frequent visits.

“Be patient,” Maria always whispered into his ear. “Our King has not left us.”

Altair spent hours every week staring at the sack that held the Apple trying to figure out if he should try to destroy the wretched thing or if he should make use of it. Whatever power it had, whatever uses Rashid had planned for it, there had be something _good_ that could come of it. But he could not bring himself to pull the sack away and look at the smooth gold surface of it again. (Perhaps he thought of Karida, at his side when his hand slid over it. Perhaps he was only afraid.)

And on the anniversary of Karida’s death, Malik sat with him on the roof of the highest tower. They watched the sunset in silence but when the world was black and only a sliver of the distant moon light the ground below, Malik said, “why did she fight at all?”

“To make a difference,” Altair said. “To protect you, perhaps.”

Malik did not cry but his face went pink before he managed to choke back whatever grief nearly broke him. When he was sure of his voice again, he cleared his throat and nodded. “She was never satisfied with her life. Even when she was very small she did not want to be held captive in the harem. I remember I used to catch her trying to climb the wall but she was never strong enough.”

Altair could not think of a single-thing-to-say so he did not say anything. When they’d climbed back down into the castle below, Maria found them in the King’s bed. She put her arms around Malik and held onto him even as his face went pink-again but still he did not cry.

A month later, give or take a few days, Maria woke them at dawn with a smile on her face. She said, “our kingdom will have an heir soon.” Malik pulled her into the bed and Altair kissed her first. She held onto them with two arms and sloppy kisses.


End file.
